Thomas von Essen, who served as New York City's fire commissioner during the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, has warned that Britain's approach to mass migration is "idiotic" and leaves the country vulnerable to the kind of extremism that killed nearly 3,000 people in his city 25 years ago.
Von Essen, now 80, lost 343 firefighters when hijacked planes brought down the World Trade Center's Twin Towers. Speaking to the Daily Mail, he said politicians who allow large numbers of people into their countries without knowing who they are or what they intend to do are making a mistake far worse than the one that let 19 Al-Qaeda hijackers carry out the 9/11 attacks.
"Letting 19 lowlifes into your country, that mistake I can understand," he said. "But how you could let thousands and thousands of people into your country and not know who they are or what their mission is... I don't care what your politics are, I think that's idiotic."
"I see what's going on in Great Britain. I think you guys might be as dumb as we are, to not know the people who hate you, where they are, and what they are doing. Why you let them in to begin with, I don't get it," he added.
Von Essen said he is more concerned about the threat of terrorism now than he was before 9/11, despite improvements in surveillance and intelligence work by agencies such as the FBI and CIA.
"I never thought that the bad guys would also have all this technology. They have AI, they're recruiting better than they did and getting more people," he said. "They're morons, most of them, but they have intelligent leaders, and the intelligent people are playing the morons. So it makes it more dangerous than it was years ago."
What von Essen saw on 9/11
Von Essen recalled arriving to work on what he called a "beautiful, clear day" and initially being told a small plane had struck the North Tower. "I figured it was some rich guy who got drunk or whatever and crashed into the building," he said.
He rushed to the scene and was walking through a blown-out window when he heard "this horrible thud" roughly 15 feet away. "I looked, and it was a person who had fallen or jumped from the sky," he said, one of an estimated 200 to 300 people who jumped from the towers that morning rather than face death by suffocation or fire.
Inside the lobby, fire chiefs told him it had not been a small plane but a commercial jet. Von Essen said crews quickly realised the water lines had been severed and the fire could not be extinguished. "We knew that those above the 90th floor were going to die," he said.
At 9:03am the South Tower was hit by a second plane. "We felt this big vibration, we thought it was an explosion in the elevator shaft," von Essen said. "When the second plane hit, of course, that's when everybody thought: 'Oh my God, we're being attacked, we're at war.'"
Evacuation and loss
Firefighters worked to evacuate the towers despite the scale of the disaster overwhelming the department's capabilities, helping an estimated 15,000 to 18,000 people escape. Emergency plans drawn up after the 1993 World Trade Center bombing had called for people to shelter in place in one tower if the other was attacked, meaning those in the South Tower were initially told to stay put when the North Tower was hit.
"If everybody had been evacuated immediately from the South Tower, we wouldn't have lost anybody. But did we know another jet plane was gonna hit the South Tower? Of course not," von Essen said.
Von Essen said search crews found no survivors after the first day. "I thought maybe there would be a piece of steel and a piece of concrete, and some young, innocent woman or man would be under there, breathing with a little bit of water dropping, and they'd survive for a few days, and we'd get them out. But we had no survivors after the first day," he said.
He described attending funerals for colleagues in the weeks that followed as "exceptionally painful," recalling grieving widows, children and parents. "We couldn't even give [families] the remains. And you think things are bad, but then when you can't even give somebody the remains of their loved one, you realise, it could be worse," he said.
Criticism of New York's mayor
Von Essen, who worked closely with then-Mayor Rudy Giuliani after the attacks, also criticised New York's current mayor, Zohran Mamdani. Mamdani faced criticism after a 2023 tweet resurfaced referencing deaths and suffering caused by the wars that followed 9/11 without mentioning who carried out the attacks, and after appearing in an interview with streamer Hasan Piker, who said in 2019 that "America deserved 9/11."
Mamdani drew further criticism after he was filmed signing an executive order designating a day of remembrance for the attacks and then handing the pen he used to a former defence lawyer for Al-Qaeda. A petition urging his exclusion from New York's annual 9/11 remembrance event has gathered more than 100,000 signatures.
"I saw [Mamdani] hand a pen for a bill he signed about September 11th, to a lawyer for the [9/11] terrorists, and I thought, doesn't he get the visuals of that? Doesn't he realize this is the week of September 11th?" von Essen said. "I don't know where he's coming from. For a smart man, seems pretty dopey to me, and I think if he was a big man, he wouldn't go to the ceremony on September 11th."
Life after 9/11
Von Essen said he has spent the years since 9/11 working in disaster response, including with the Federal Emergency Management Agency on hurricane relief in Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands and on New York City's Covid-19 response. "I had this desire to continue," he said. "I'm still involved and still working and trying to help people."
He also works with the UK-based charity Since 9/11, which campaigns to make education about the attacks mandatory in British schools. "It's pretty relevant for kids to understand that there are bad people out there. They didn't go away. I think it's critical to the future for education on this topic to continue," he said.
Von Essen was appointed an honorary CBE by Queen Elizabeth II in 2002, alongside then-Police Commissioner Bernard Kerik and Mayor Giuliani, in recognition of their service during the attacks and their aftermath.
