Former Vice President Kamala Harris marked the 25th anniversary of the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on Friday with a solemn tribute posted to social media, honoring the nearly 3,000 people killed that day and the families who have carried their loss for a quarter-century.
Harris posted the statement on X at 7:38 a.m. on September 11, 2026, as ceremonies commemorating the anniversary began across the country, including the annual reading of victims’ names at the World Trade Center site in New York.
“25 years have passed since September 11, 2001. A generation has grown up in the years since, but our responsibility to remember has not changed,” Harris wrote in the post.
“We remember the people who went to work that morning and never came home, and we remember the families who have carried their memories every day since,” she continued.
Harris closed the post with a pledge to continue honoring the victims’ memory. “We will continue to tell their stories, honor their lives, and express our enduring gratitude for the heroism shown that day,” she wrote.
A recurring anniversary tradition
Friday’s post continued a pattern Harris has followed for years, marking each September 11 anniversary with public statements honoring victims, survivors and first responders. As vice president under President Joe Biden, Harris traveled to Ground Zero, the Pentagon and Shanksville, Pennsylvania, for the 2024 commemorations, writing at the time that the nation would “never forget the 2,977 lives lost on 9/11.”
Harris has also used past anniversaries to draw broader connections between 9/11 and other moments of national crisis. Speaking on January 6, 2022, during a ceremony marking the second anniversary of the attack on the U.S. Capitol, Harris compared that day to the September 11 attacks in terms of their lasting impact on the country’s sense of security.
In an earlier statement released in 2019, before she became vice president, Harris wrote that the country would “always remember the lives we lost on 9/11, the first responders who ran towards danger to save others, and those who gave their lives to keep our nation safe,” adding that the country had shown the world “we won’t be shaken by fear.”
The 25th anniversary observance
Friday’s 25th anniversary drew ceremonies at all three attack sites, with events beginning in lower Manhattan and continuing throughout the morning, including a remembrance at the Firemen’s Memorial on Riverside Drive honoring the 343 members of the New York City Fire Department who died in the attacks.
President Donald Trump was expected to attend commemorations of his own Friday, part of a broader slate of political and public figures marking what falls this year on a milestone anniversary, a quarter-century removed from the day nearly 3,000 people were killed in coordinated hijackings that struck the World Trade Center, the Pentagon and a field near Shanksville.
Harris’s public role since leaving office
Harris, who lost the 2024 presidential election to Trump after entering the race following Biden’s withdrawal, has largely stayed engaged in public life through a national book tour tied to her campaign memoir, “107 Days,” released in September 2025.
The tour, which began in the fall of 2025, was extended into 2026 with a new round of stops running from January through April, expanding beyond the traditionally Democratic areas Harris focused on earlier in the tour to include stops in Mississippi, Alabama, Detroit and Madison, Wisconsin.
Harris’s spokeswoman, Kirsten Allen, said at the time that the former vice president intended to use the tour stops to gather input from voters ahead of the 2026 midterm elections. “The vice president wants to keep listening and sharing what she’s heard with a focus on the future: what people want from their leaders, where we’ve fallen short, how we re-invent, and what it will take to move forward beyond this political moment,” Allen said.
Harris has said the book and the tour were not meant as an exercise in nostalgia. “I wrote the book with the intention that this would be about remembering where we were, only for the purposes of contextualizing this moment, and then thinking about where we have to go,” she told CNN in September 2025.
“107 Days” spent its first ten weeks on bestseller lists after publication, with more than 600,000 copies sold, and Harris has continued to weigh whether to seek elected office again after declining to run for California governor in 2026.
Bipartisan tradition around the anniversary
September 11 commemorations have historically drawn bipartisan participation, with sitting and former officials from both parties typically setting aside political disputes to jointly honor victims and first responders. Political scientists have noted that both major parties’ leaders generally avoid overtly political messaging on the anniversary itself, treating it as a moment of shared national mourning rather than partisan contrast.
Harris’s Friday statement followed that convention, focusing exclusively on remembrance of victims and gratitude toward those who responded to the attacks, without reference to current policy debates or the 2026 midterm campaign.
The 25th anniversary arrives as a new generation — many of them born after 2001 — reaches adulthood without direct memory of the attacks, a reality Harris’s post referenced directly in noting that “a generation has grown up in the years since” while the obligation to remember “has not changed.”