It’s been nearly 25 years since the tragic events of Sept. 11, 2001, left the nation reeling. But the memory of the attacks lives on vividly in “Turning Point: Generation 9/11,” a new Netflix documentary that examines how that day shaped the next generation and one of the darkest chapters in American history.

From children who lost their parents on 9/11 to journalists who covered the early years of the War on Terror and young Marines who inherited the conflict, the documentary, which premiered Sept. 2, contextualizes these firsthand accounts of the attacks and how their aftermath continues to affect America today.

Beyond revisiting a play-by-play of what happened on 9/11, the film also highlights the politicians, including President Donald Trump, who helped carry on the global military campaign against terrorism launched by the George W. Bush administration.

One part of the documentary revisits Trump’s first presidential campaign, when he used right-wing foreign policy rhetoric to appeal to voters.

“What we saw very early on was that the War on Terror was a pathway to power for inflamed nativist elements that felt the country was further and further slipping away from them,” Spencer Ackerman, author of “Reign of Terror,” said in the doc. “Trump’s movement recognized that there was still a tremendous amount of political potency to be had from the War on Terror.”

“Generation 9/11” features footage from a December 2015 rally in which then-presidential candidate Trump called for “a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States,” along with a 2016 interview with CNN in which he said, “I think Islam hates us.”

The film also revisits Trump’s controversial pledge to build a wall along the U.S.-Mexico border, which he made while announcing his 2016 presidential campaign, and also declared, “Nobody would be tougher on ISIS than Donald Trump.”

The documentary also traces the origins of federal agencies that have since been weaponized by the current Trump administration, including the Department of Homeland Security and U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

“There was never something called Homeland Security in the United States before 9/11,” Ackerman pointed out in the film, describing the agency as a “relic of European nationalisms” that contradicts the notion that anyone who embraces American values and wants to live here should be welcomed as a citizen.

He added, “Now, all of a sudden, the elements of American immigration policy had a counterterrorism mandate behind them. That was the beginning of the agencies that would become ICE.”

Former President George W. Bush established DHS on Oct. 8, 2001, less than a month after the terrorist attacks, while ICE was created in 2003 following the passage of the Homeland Security Act the year before.

According to the documentary, the creation of these agencies reflected the government’s growing concern not only over terrorism targeting the U.S. abroad, but also over perceived threats on American soil.

The film argues that, had past administrations responded differently to the events of 9/11— and had federal law not included broadly worded provisions that created opportunities for immigration agents today to overreach — the trajectory of agencies like ICE might have been very different.

But instead, those expansive authorities have helped create the conditions for a now multibillion-dollar agency that, according to the documentary, has been allowed to adopt policies and practices that infringe on Americans’ rights — from random traffic stops and arrests to detaining people and, in some cases, killing them.

“We see the harm this does to our own sense of legal constraints on the president’s authority,” Oona Hathaway, who served as special counsel to the general counsel at the U.S. Department of Defense from 2014 to 2015, said in the film.

“We see these military tactics coming back home,” she added. “We see some of the treatment of Americans that looks awfully familiar for people who have seen the War on Terror abroad, and now realize, ‘Oh, it’s a terrible thing when a single person can order a use of military force, or order a use of force that’s lethal, and there’s nothing I can do about it.’”

As Ackerman stated toward the end of the documentary, while political leaders have tried to convince the public that the War on Terror is over, many of the institutions and operations it created remain, simply “finding new targets.”

The scale of that expansion became clear earlier this year, when NPR declared ICE the best-funded U.S. law enforcement agency, with an $85 billion budget at its disposal to advance the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown.

“We should not fool ourselves into thinking we have seen its final form,” Ackerman warned in the film. “It will come for more and more of us.”

“Turning Point: Generation 9/11” is streaming now on Netflix.

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