On September 11, 2001 I was working in the united states senate so i was working in Washington DC
and I will never forget that day. It was a beautiful fall day in DC crystal clear blue sky
and I was working for Senator Kennedy. I was his judiciary committee chief counsel
and he had a hearing that morning with the first lady with first lady Laura Bush and I
walked to his personal office from my office to take his briefing book and I remember walking in
and colleagues said wow a plane has hit the world trade center and we speculated whether the pilot
had had a heart attack or what may have happened. I got back to my building and I remember as the
doors on the elevator were closing I overheard two capitol police officers talking and I distinctly
remember hearing the word terrorism. My closest friend was working in Soho at that time and I saw
the second plane hit and I called her and I was lucky enough to get through and I remember she
was crying and she had seen that happen and I talked to her for a minute and she said she was
going to try and make her way home and I hung up and I looked at my staff and I said we're getting
out of here. We were overhearing things on radios we felt like we heard or felt the ground shake
and one of my colleagues who lived on capitol hill invited us to go to her house and we sat
there we watched the television for the rest of the day. and finally that night I made my way
home I lived in northern Virginia so I had to go past the pentagon the after effect for those of us
working on Capitol Hill was the strong sense that the United States government had to show that it
wasn't going to be shaken that we were a strong country that we would continue to do our work
that we would get to the bottom of what had happened and that we would protect the nation and
our people and that meant that the next morning I was making my way across the 14th street bridge
again passing a burning and smoldering Pentagon to go to work that sense of intense focus on
issues of security, homeland security, immigration kind of a shift in the way that people perceived
immigration it wasn't just an economic debate anymore. It ramped up considerably and it has
stayed at a heightened level we as a country have never returned to a pre-9/11 period. The debate
now and the issues and the concerns almost seem like they're part of the DNA of the country.