Archives Closures Threaten to Bury U.S. History

Archivists, historians, genealogists and family researchers are raising alarms that the Trump administration’s plan to close federal records facilities in Northern California and Chicago could effectively bury significant portions of the nation’s past, including irreplaceable immigration records, landmark court case files and documents central to American civil rights history. According to NBC News, the closures would affect facilities that hold records spanning more than a century of American history.

The Planned Closures

The National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) announced in June that it would close its facilities in San Bruno, California (the National Archives at San Francisco) and Chicago, Illinois, while transitioning out of the Seattle Federal Records Center. NARA Chief Operating Officer Jay Trainer sent an internal email to staff on June 23, 2026, outlining the decision, which the agency said is a cost-cutting measure to support its long-term financial health and reduce its real estate portfolio in alignment with the administration’s priorities.

According to Federal News Network, records relocations are expected to begin within the next few months—as early as August 2026—with the transition expected to be completed over the next couple of years. The agency has not specified where the records will be relocated or how many employees will be affected.

Irreplaceable Historical Records at Risk

The San Bruno facility houses more than 75,000 cubic feet of original records and thousands of microfilmed documents and photographs. Among its holdings are immigration records from Angel Island—the “Ellis Island of the West”—along with the case files of Wong Kim Ark, whose landmark 1898 Supreme Court case affirmed birthright citizenship under the 14th Amendment. The archive also contains Bruce Lee’s immigration files, Alcatraz prison records, documents related to the 1906 San Francisco earthquake, and records on Japanese American internment, including materials from the Tanforan Assembly Center located across the highway from the facility.

As KQED reported, the closure plans come at a particularly sensitive moment, as the Supreme Court recently struck down President Trump’s Executive Order 14160 that would have curtailed birthright citizenship—a decision that drew directly on the legal precedent established by the Wong Kim Ark case.

Sandra Wong, a descendant of Wong Kim Ark, told SFGate that the archives were essential to understanding her family’s history: “This is very important because this is how I learned and discovered about what Wong Kim Ark went through.”

The Chicago facility holds equally significant materials, including transcripts from the Trial of the Chicago 7, maritime records for the Great Lakes region, documents on tribal nations and Bureau of Indian Affairs records, naturalization records, federal court cases on the Pullman Strike of 1894, and Chinese Exclusion Act case files from Chicago and St. Paul, Minnesota. As Block Club Chicago reported, only a small percentage of the Chicago repository’s vast collection has been digitized, meaning most records are only available in person.

Researchers and Communities Sound the Alarm

Bradford Hunt, professor and chair of Loyola University Chicago’s history department, described the scale of the facility to Block Club Chicago: “It’s this enormous facility. It’s kind of Indiana Jones-like when you go in there… there’s just massive amounts of material. These have the records of the district court and you’ll see these pallets wrapped with 40 boxes and then they shrink wrap it, and that’s just like one court case.”

Ellen Driscoll, a professional genealogist who has worked for 14 years and regularly visits the Chicago facility, expressed concerns about relying on NARA’s online system: “It doesn’t work. So not only can I not do it in person now, I’ve got a system that’s unreliable and that’s one of my biggest concerns as a researcher.”

The closures would also impact communities that depend on these records for essential purposes. As WBEZ Chicago reported, local archivists warn that the archives are frequented by people seeking naturalization records to prove citizenship status, descendants of indigenous people who attended government boarding schools, and veterans looking for information about vessels they served on in the Great Lakes.

Union and Employee Concerns

The Chicago facility has 17 employees, 11 of whom are represented by AFGE Council 260. NARA has faced a net staffing decrease of more than 500 employees since the Trump administration began, leaving the agency with just under 2,400 employees total. David Castillo, president of AFGE Council 260, said the agency has a responsibility to its staff: “We believe the agency has a responsibility to staff, many of whom have been employed by the National Archives for much of their careers. We believe that includes a responsibility to relocate employees to other facilities or offer them the ability to work remotely, where possible.”

A Pattern of Underfunding and Closure Attempts

This is not the first time these facilities have faced closure. Advocates successfully thwarted a 1998 plan to close the San Bruno facility, and in August 2024, NARA announced it was shuttering three other facilities and relocating two offices. As The Voice of San Francisco noted, historians and advocates have long warned that the National Archives has been chronically underfunded for decades.

Sarah Weicksel, executive director of the American Historical Association, told Block Club Chicago: “NARA has been chronically underfunded for decades. When Congress is not providing enough funding to support that infrastructure, to support digitization and to support the staff whose expertise is required to process records, you are necessarily going to have an archives that is not performing at its full capacity.”

What’s at Stake

The advocacy group Save Our National Archives (SONA), which was founded to oppose the 1990s attempt to move records from San Bruno, is organizing letter-writing campaigns, petitions and advocacy efforts to reverse the closure plans. The group has published statements from leading historians and organizations on its website, including an essay by Erika Lee, the Bae Family Professor of History at Harvard University, who described the impact of losing access to these records.

Anna Eng, a historian and SONA member, described the emotional significance of accessing these records in the SF Chronicle: “It’s like excavating the bones of the past. The emotions. I can’t describe how moving it is to be able to even hold the piece of paper… it is like creating wholeness.”

Erika Lee, Bae Family Professor of History at Harvard University, warned of the consequences of losing access to these records and the expertise of NARA archivists: “I know what it is like to try to research and write histories of immigration and race without these records and without the expertise of professional NARA archivists.”

The Council of State Archivists, NAGARA, and SAA issued a joint statement emphasizing that “these documents cannot be removed to locations distant from where they are used by the communities who need them.” The statement added: “The people of the United States must have access to these archives at a level that is equal to or better than what is currently available.”

Looking Ahead

With records relocations potentially beginning as early as this month, advocates are urging Congress to intervene and calling on the administration to reverse its decision. The fight to preserve these archives is expected to continue into 2027, when lawmakers could take legislative steps to block or reverse the closures and appropriate the funds necessary to keep these facilities open.

As historians and community advocates make clear, the stakes extend far beyond dusty documents and archival shelves. These records represent the lived experiences of generations of Americans—immigrants who passed through Angel Island, families who fought for their citizenship, communities who endured internment, and workers who shaped the nation’s industrial history. The question now is whether the nation will preserve access to its own memory or allow it to be buried.