California Attorney General Rob Bonta announced Wednesday that his office has filed a lawsuit against the federal government to prevent the closure of a San Bruno facility that houses historic archives.
The National Archives at San Francisco — actually located in San Bruno — is home to historical documents dating back to the 1850s, including records of the landmark birthright citizenship case United States v. Wong Kim Ark, the Chinese exclusion era, the internment of German, Italian, and Japanese Americans, various Alcatraz prison inmates, and the Mexican land grant cases.
Immigration, naval, geological, and tribal records covering California, Nevada, Hawaii, Guam, American Samoa, and other parts of the Pacific are also stored in the facility.
In June, the National Archives and Records Administration, a federal agency that preserves historical records and makes them accessible to the public, announced plans to shutter the San Bruno facility to cut operating costs and reduce the agency’s physical footprint.
In the lawsuit filed Wednesday in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, Bonta’s office alleges that NARA’s decision to close the facility without consulting the local community constitutes a violation of the Administrative Procedure Act.
Federal agencies don’t get to make decisions like this on a whim.
Attorney General Rob Bonta
Speaking at a press conference held Wednesday outside the National Archives building in San Bruno, Bonta said that NARA plans to transfer the archives from the San Bruno facility to five different facilities across the country. The first box of archives is set to depart as early as this week, he added.
“Federal agencies don’t get to make decisions like this on a whim,” Bonta said. “They have to follow the law, they have to consider the impact on the people that they serve, and NARA did none of that. Instead, it decided unilaterally and behind closed doors to pack up our history and ship it away.”
Apart from historians and researchers, the archives are an important repository of records for Native tribes to obtain federal recognition, recover ancestral lands, and trace genealogies.
Heather Hostler, executive director at California Indian Legal Services, a nonprofit offering legal services to Native communities, said records housed at the San Bruno facility have helped restore federal recognition to 17 California tribes.
Hostler added that since most records are not digitized, moving them out of California will limit the state’s Native tribes’ ability to access them.
“For many people, archives sound like history,” Hostler said. “For tribes, these archives are vital to the future.”
Michael Ishii, executive director of Tsuru for Solidarity, an organization founded by survivors of the incarceration of Japanese Americans during World War II, also spoke in opposition to NAR’s decision.
“These archives hold records of our families, our imprisonment and our resistance,” said Ishii. “This is a form of historical erasure. At a time when our nation is once again witnessing mass detention, deportations, attacks on birthright citizenship and the erosion of constitutional protections, we cannot allow the evidence of our past to be carried away from the communities that need it most.”
In August, U.S. Reps. Kevin Mullin, D-San Mateo, and Judy Chu, D-Claremont, had led a bipartisan coalition of 37 lawmakers in sending NARA a letter urging the agency to reconsider the closure.
Reacting to Wednesday’s announcement, Mullin said in a news release, “The fact that we have developed a bipartisan, nationwide coalition of federal lawmakers interested in preserving these archives demonstrates the unique and irreplaceable value they hold.”
“These archives aren’t just boxes of paper — they hold the stories, memories, and history of generations of Americans,” added Mullin, who has also introduced a bill in Congress titled the National Archives Protection Act to prevent NARA from closing archival facilities.
The National Archives and Records Administration did not immediately respond to a request for comment.