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WASHINGTON, D.C. – Today, America First Legal (AFL) released a 9/11 Parent Toolkit, a comprehensive guide designed to help parents teach their children what happened on September 11, 2001, who carried out the attacks, and how failures in America’s immigration system helped the hijackers enter and remain in the United States. The toolkit is available through AFL’s Parent and Student Action Center.
Friday, September 11, 2026, marks the 25th commemoration of the deadliest terrorist attack on American Soil. Nearly 3,000 people were murdered by 19 al-Qaeda terrorists–all of whom were foreign nationals–who hijacked four large commercial airplanes, determined to kill as many as possible. Two planes struck the World Trade Center. One struck the Pentagon. The fourth, United Flight 93–intended for either the White House or the U.S. Capitol–was taken down by brave passengers who sacrificed their lives by crashing the plane in a rural field in Somerset County, Pennsylvania.
The attacks were the product of years of planning by a radical Islamic terrorist organization, and of failures in the immigration system that let the hijackers in. The 9/11 Commission Report and its Terrorist Travel staff report document how the 19 men used visas, ports of entry, and flight schools inside the United States:
All but one entered on tourist or business visas. The remaining hijacker, Hani Hanjour, entered on an F-1 student visa and never attended the English program he used to obtain it. The visa system approved 22 of 23 applications and interviewed only two of the men. Border inspectors admitted them 33 times through nine airports, across 43 immigration and customs checkpoints. Three presented passports with al-Qaeda extremist indicators; two presented fraudulently altered passports; two made materially false statements on their visa applications. By September 11, Satam al Suqami and Nawaf al-Hazmi had overstayed. The United States had no entry-exit system that would have shown they were still here. Mohamed Atta and Marwan al-Shehhi entered as tourists, enrolled in U.S. flight schools, and applied to change status to vocational students. INS took more than ten months to decide and mailed the approval notices to Huffman Aviation in March 2002—six months after the attacks. The Commission concluded that document and travel-pattern analysis could have intercepted as many as 4 to 15 of the 19. Where that screening was applied, it worked: Mohamed al-Kahtani was refused entry at Orlando, and Zacarias Moussaoui was held on immigration charges.
Parents cannot teach that lesson if schools skip who the hijackers were, how they entered the country, and why those gaps still matter. President Donald J. Trump and his Administration have put those lessons back at the center of national policy. On September 9, 2026, the President proclaimed Patriot Day and called for the vow to Never Forget to be “taught in every classroom.” He has directed agencies to vet and screen foreign nationals to the maximum degree possible so terrorists cannot exploit the same visa and border weaknesses the hijackers used.
Twenty-five years later, most Americans under 30 have no living memory of that morning. Yet many classrooms omit the facts or recast 9/11 as a story about American prejudice. A 2025 House resolution found that only 14 states then required students to be educated about the attacks. The National Education Association’s 2025 Handbook, a compilation of the nation’s largest teachers union policy and resolutions, contains no reference to 9/11.
In other districts, 9/11 is used as a vehicle for anti-American activism:
In Fairfax County, Virginia, a new 9/11 teaching guide treats the attacks chiefly as a lesson in “safe spaces for Muslim and Middle Eastern students.” It tells teachers not to “associate the 9/11 attacks with Islam or Muslims” and not to “center the extremists or the acts of the extremists.” It does not name Osama bin Laden or Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. Only about 15 percent of the guide sets out specific instruction about what happened on September 11. In California, a required ethnic-studies course in the North Monterey County Unified School District treats September 11 mainly as an Islamophobia story. One slide tells students that “9/11 made the already existing prejudices against Arab and Muslim Americans more obvious and shameless.” The same unit points students to Osama bin Laden’s Letter to America as evidence that the United States was targeting “Muslim communities.” In New Jersey, the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) distributes a Muslim Studies Curriculum to school districts that describes the perpetrators as “a group self-identifying as al-Qaeda hailing from the mountains of Afghanistan,” and tells students the hijackers “launched the attacks in response to America’s support of Israel, their involvement in the Persian Gulf War, and the vast presence of the US military in the Middle East.” In New York, teachers have sat through training framed around teaching “9/11 with Muslim students in their classrooms” amid a “growing tide of Islamophobia.” Between 2012 and 2026, the New York City Department of Education spent more than $1 million on contracts with the group that offered that training. In New Mexico, a high-school social studies instructional scope tells teachers to run 9/11 through “critical consciousness,” with an emphasis on how the attacks affected “diverse groups in America.”
AFL’s 9/11 Parent Toolkit gives families the record that those classrooms leave out. It provides:
A factual account of the attacks grounded in the public record, including the 9/11 Commission Report. Age-appropriate lessons and videos that families can preview and watch together. A template letter parents can send to teachers and administrators requesting all 9/11 instructional materials. A template letter parents can send to state and local education officials demanding a factual 9/11 curriculum.
Parents hold the fundamental, Constitutionally protected right to direct the upbringing and education of their children. AFL calls on parents to teach their children the truth about September 11, to find out what their schools are teaching, and to demand accurate instruction.
“A moment of silence is not an education,” said Gene Hamilton, President of America First Legal. “President Trump is right. The vow to Never Forget must be taught in every classroom, and the Administration is finally treating visa and border security as national security. Parents must take charge of their children’s education, learn what their schools are teaching about September 11, and make sure the next generation knows the facts, including how the attackers used our immigration system against us.”
“Parents have an obligation to proactively educate their children about our country’s history, including what happened on September 11, 2001, and we call upon America’s parents to do so,” said Julie Alexa Strauss, General Counsel of America First Legal. “Twenty-five years after 9/11, we are experiencing a generational amnesia in our national memory. Our children do not know what happened that morning. They have no idea that acts of terror — unimagined in our country’s consciousness — hit American soil, perpetrated by evildoers driven by a hatred of the United States that continues to this day.” “We cannot allow a defining chapter of American history to be forgotten, censored, or rewritten by an ideological agenda that seeks to dismantle America’s Founding Principles. Our children not only deserve, but must know who attacked America and why. The extraordinary courage of the Americans who fought back and gave their lives in the wake of this radical Islamic attack on our soil must not be forgotten.”
American history is fundamental to our liberty, and neither is inherited automatically. Both must be taught, defended, and preserved.
Read the 9/11 Parent Toolkit here.
Find more of AFL’s resources for parents here.
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