9/11 Victim's Daughter: Families Still Demand Justice 25 Years On

You can feel the deadline breathing down everyone’s neck: Sept. 30. Angela Mistrulli is walking the halls at the Republican convention, not asking for sympathy but asking Congress to do its job and fund the USVSST Fund before it runs out. That’s not a “nice to have.” If we can’t take care of the families we already promised to help, what are we even doing here?

It’s easy for Washington to treat 9/11 as a date for speeches and a flag backdrop. Then the cameras move on, and the paperwork sits. But these families have been carrying the cost for 25 years, in medical bills, in funerals, in long-term fallout the country barely bothered to track until it had to. Justice doesn’t age out just because the news cycle does. When a fund has a hard deadline, “we’ll get to it” is just a slower way of saying no.

There’s also something refreshingly blunt about taking this fight to the GOP convention. It’s a reminder that Republicans can be the party of borders and backbone and still show up for Americans who paid a price for an attack on our soil. Funding the USVSST Fund should be a layup, not a partisan knife fight. Pass the funding. Don’t play games. And if certain members of Congress want to posture about “America First,” here’s a clean test: put the money there before Sept. 30, and stop making these families beg for what they were already told they’d have.