|
WASHINGTON - Today, Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro N. Mayorkas released the following statement and video on International Holocaust Remembrance Day:
"When you walked into the home where I grew up, our living room shelves were filled with books of Jewish history and, regrettably and all too often tragically, histories and stories of antisemitism and violence that accompanied it.
"My mother had lived this history. As a girl, she and her parents fled from Romania to France, and on to Cuba, because they could not make it safely to Israel or the United States. Her father lost his parents, brothers, and other family members in the Holocaust. Through the years in the United States, my mother stayed in touch with her two cousins who survived the camps and had made it to Israel alone.
"Our home was deeply rooted in my mother's experience of the Holocaust and the fragility of our safety, wherever we might live in the world. As you might expect, my mother's childhood profoundly shaped her approach to a young child away from home through the night. When our fellow elementary school students went to sleepaway camps and had sleepovers with friends, my siblings and I did not. My mother taught us the meaning and experience of independence in different ways.
"She also taught us three foundational principles that defined for her the scourge of antisemitism and other ideologies of hate. First, their existence manifests in ways that we readily can see, but also lies more widely beneath the surface, often undetected in the day-to-day goings-on of life but sometimes appearing in the most subtle of ways. Second, their prevalence continues to present an existential threat, and one can never assume that a holocaust could not happen again and could not happen where we, her children, might live. And third, that an attack borne of hate against one minority is an attack against all of society.
"I am proud to work in the Department of Homeland Sec
|
|
On September 9, 2021, Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro N. Mayorkas delivered remarks at the National Press Club. See below for the Secretary's delivered remarks:
Thank you so much, Lisa, and thank you all for giving me the opportunity to share some remarks. I want to start on a note of solemnity and resilience, and end on a note of generosity and hope, and in between speak of the challenges that we are facing and how we are addressing them, and what it says about who we are and who we want to be. And I want to make brief remarks so we leave as much time as possible for a conversation.
Yesterday at the Department of Homeland Security's headquarters in St. Elizabeths we had a special ceremony. Shortly after 9/11, in the aftermath of that tragic day, amidst the rubble, a tree was found that was struggling, but still alive. And it was a Callery pear tree and the New York City Department of Parks and Recreation took custody of the tree and rehabilitated it over the ensuing weeks and months and years, and it was termed the "survivor tree." And when it produced a seed, a seed would be distributed to a community or a town that had unfortunately also suffered tremendous tragedy and loss.
Sadly, there are many of them, and the seeds have been distributed to them, whether it be Orlando, Newtown, Boston, Las Vegas, and many others. The seeds of that survivor tree have also been distributed to places of tribute and honor and memory. And we in the Department of Homeland Security, we're extraordinarily privileged to receive a seed planted yesterday. And it speaks to the resilience of our country. And to that, to the fact that that resilience is born of the work and dedication of people across the country, including those in the Department of Homeland Security.
At this time in our country, two days from 9/11, we think, of course, of the lives that were lost on 9/11 2001 as a result of the tragedy, and we really doubled down on our commitment to e
|
|
