We spend most days here grumbling about the news. So when a newsroom does something really good, we should say it just as loudly. Today’s thank-you note goes to NPR. * Every 9/11 anniversary looks the same on TV: the names, the bells, the dark coats. This year NPR went somewhere else. It went to an office building in Queens, where a group of immigrants in their 50s and 60s meets once a week. They met 25 years ago, in the rubble. * The details hit hard. One woman, from Colombia, got picked up on a street corner the morning after the attacks and was offered $8.50 an hour. She went in with a paper mask and rubber gloves. She has since fought breast cancer and breathing problems. Advocates think 2,000 to 6,000 undocumented workers did this job. * Now many of them are scared of deportation. She won’t even visit her daughter in New Jersey. Her words to NPR belong on a plaque. Back then, “No one ever asked to check out immigration status.” * NPR also did the dull, important part. It found the bill that would give these workers a path to citizenship, the 9/11 Immigrant Worker Freedom Act. First introduced in 2017. Stuck ever since. Zero Republican backers. NPR asked the White House for comment and got no answer. * As far as we could find, NPR was the only one of the 20 outlets we follow to tell this story. Elsewhere, the anniversary coverage was busy with who laughed at the ceremony and whose hand got shaken. * One small wish: the story shows the fear, but not the arrests. Has ICE actually picked up any of these workers? That’s the follow-up we’d love to read, and NPR is clearly the newsroom to write it. * On a day built for speeches about heroes, NPR found the ones nobody invited to the podium. That’s American journalism on a good day. More of those, please.