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Secretary Mullin Addresses DHS 25th Anniversary Observance of 9/11

September 11, 2026 · U.S. Department of Homeland Security · 0:41:25

Embedded from the source channel — never re-uploaded. Watch on YouTube

What happened

The Department of Homeland Security held its observance ceremony for the 25th anniversary of the September 11, 2001 attacks, with a Coast Guard honor guard, the national anthem and an invocation remembering the lives lost and the first responders who, as the chaplain put it, ran toward danger. A department official introducing the Secretary recalled serving a first tour at DHS as chief financial officer and described the department, under what he called Secretary Mullin’s leadership, as taking the fight to counterterrorism, drug smugglers and traffickers and sealing the border, as he characterized its work. He pointed to steel from one of the towers kept at the plaza as a reminder of why the department exists, as he stated it.

Secretary Markwayne Mullin called the anniversary both a time of reflection and, as he put it, a time to look at the success of the department, saying DHS was stood up because of failures leading up to 9/11. He said about 270,000 people at the department — across the Coast Guard, Customs and Border Protection, HSI, CISA, the Secret Service and its other components — wake up every day defending the homeland, as he stated the figure, and described the mission as zero-fail: every lead, however small, gets followed because, as he put it, the department cannot afford to miss one opportunity to prevent another attack.

Why it matters

The ceremony records how DHS leadership under Secretary Mullin frames the department’s founding mission a quarter-century after 9/11 — prevention through connecting every lead — at the same time the department’s public emphasis has centered on border and interior enforcement.

Sources: U.S. Department of Homeland Security, “DHS 25th Anniversary of 9/11 Observance Ceremony”, 2026-09-11 (official upload, embedded above; published 2026-09-11). Transcript via Supadata (private research store, paraphrased and attributed, not republished). All figures and characterizations as stated by the speakers.