By Staff Writer, NewsAmericas Now
News Americas, NEW YORK, NY, Fri. Sept. 11, 2026: As the nation marks 25 years since the September 11, 2001 attacks today, what is lost in the story is that more than 100 Caribbean immigrants who died on 9/11 remain largely absent from the national conversation, despite representing at least 14 different nations and territories across the region.
Guyana, Jamaica, Trinidad and Tobago, Haiti, the Dominican Republic, Barbados, Antigua and Barbuda, Bermuda, the British Virgin Islands, Dominica, Grenada, Saint Lucia, Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, and Puerto Rico all lost sons and daughters that day, most of them working ordinary jobs in finance, food service, and building maintenance in the World Trade Center towers, having built new lives in New York after emigrating from home.
Karl Henry Joseph, a firefighter with Engine 207, was born in Haiti and lived in Brooklyn. He was among the first responders who rushed toward the towers as thousands fled, and he did not make it out.
A cricket star turned Navy technician
Kris Romeo Bishundat was just 23 when he died at the Pentagon. Born in Guyana, he had represented Guyana’s Under-19 cricket team before later becoming a U.S. Navy Information Systems Technician, living in Waldorf, Maryland at the time of his death.
Nizam Hafiz, also Guyana-born, had similarly played for Guyana’s Under-19 cricket squad and gone on to represent the USA National Cricket Team, working for Marsh & McLennan in the World Trade Center when he was killed.
An artist whose work foreshadowed his death
Michael Richards, a Jamaica-born artist living in Queens, New York, kept a studio on the 92nd floor of the World Trade Center’s Tower 1 as part of a work residency program. Richards had spent years creating sculptures depicting Black airmen, including the Tuskegee Airmen, and his work was known for imagery involving flight, sacrifice, and bodies pierced by aircraft, imagery that took on haunting new meaning after he died in the towers that morning.
A family of loss in Windows on the World
Kamini Singh and Ronald Singh both worked at Windows on the World, the restaurant atop Tower 1’s 107th floor, and both died there. Joyce Smith, born in Kingston, Jamaica, and Sarah Khan, who worked in food service on the same floor, were also lost.
Why their stories matter now
The anniversary arrives this year alongside renewed public reckoning over 9/11’s aftermath. Immigrant advocates argue that this lack of visibility reflects a broader erasure of immigrant contributions in American history. This is not just about symbolism — it’s about memory and belonging. Honoring Caribbean victims is honoring the immigrant backbone of New York. It is acknowledging that these men and women were part of the city’s heartbeat.
Some have called for Caribbean-specific commemorations each September, whether through school programs, church services, or cultural centers across the region and diaspora. Others want scholarship funds and community initiatives established in the names of those lost.New York City this week released 170,000 pages of previously undisclosed documents that Mayor Zohran Mamdani says show government efforts to mislead residents about dangerous air quality after the towers collapsed. “People got sick because the leaders they trusted lied and told them they were safe to breathe in toxic air,” Mamdani said at a Tuesday news conference, describing the release as overdue “accountability” for New Yorkers.
Many of the immigrants who died on 9/11, and the thousands more from Caribbean communities who worked in recovery and cleanup in the months that followed, were among those exposed to that toxic air without adequate protection. Twenty-five years later, the full human cost, both from that morning and from the years of illness that followed, remains difficult to fully account for.
SEE A FULL LIST OF THEIR NAMES HERE
NewsAmericasNow honors the more than 100 Caribbean immigrants lost on September 11, 2001, and continues covering the anniversary’s ongoing significance for the diaspora.
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