Originally published on August 24, 2026 by the SF Chronicle and written by Hannah Wiley.
Satsuki Ina initially traveled to the National Archives facility in San Bruno 20 years ago in search of ship records of her family’s travels from Japan to the United States.
But buried in records from the Japanese American Internment era, Ina discovered a shocking new detail of her own history. When she was born in 1944 at the War Relocation Authority’s Tule Lake Segregation Center, the government listed Ina not as a citizen, but an “enemy alien.”
Ina’s parents were Kibei, meaning they were born in the U.S. as citizens but lived in Japan during childhood, which made them government targets for suspicion of disloyalty during internment. Ina said her parents were coerced into renouncing their citizenship, not realizing “they were going to suddenly become enemy aliens, which meant that their citizenship in the U.S. was null and void.”
Ina credits the National Archives for helping her chronicle that painful past in her memoir “The Poet and the Silk Girl,” which was published in 2024.
But access to those documents is now at risk. This summer, the National Archives and Records Administration internally announced plans to close the San Bruno facility and a Chicago branch and relocate their records to other locations across the country within the next three years. The administration cited costs and improving “efficiency and effectiveness” in its email to staff.
The pending closures have drawn strong opposition from more than three dozen members of Congress, who recently wrote a letter detailing their concerns with an alleged lack of transparency into the decision and how the scattering of records would affect local communities. The San Bruno branch includes archives from California, Nevada, Hawaii and the Pacific Island territories and houses tribal records. Some of the documents date back to the 19th century and are in a fragile state, advocates say, which means they could be easily damaged or destroyed in a rushed move, or lost altogether.
Rep. Kevin Mullin, D-San Mateo, who is leading the congressional coalition protesting the decision, said he was most worried about how shuttering the facility would “dismantle access to our region’s past” during a press conference at the San Bruno facility on Monday.
Mullin called on NARA to explain its decision to shutter the branch, and urged the administration to consider how its closure would affect staff. He also requested more information on how much it costs to operate the facility and whether there are other savings measures to consider in lieu of closure. Mullin also introduced legislation this month, dubbed the National Archives Protection Act, to block NARA from closing certain facilities without congressional approval.
NARA did not respond to questions about the San Bruno location’s operating costs and why the administration decided to close it.
The documents in San Bruno cover historically significant events for the Bay Area and, more broadly, the West Coast, from Japanese American internment camps to the Chinese Exclusion Act era. The branch’s archives contain files on Bruce Lee’s immigration to Wong Kim Ark’s 1898 birthright citizenship case at the U.S. Supreme Court. The branch is also home to genealogical files, along with records on Alcatraz inmates like Al Capone and George Kelly Barnes, or “Machine Gun Kelly.”
“These records belong in the Bay Area,” Mullin said.
The San Bruno location was first targeted for closure nearly three decades ago, but community advocates rallied to save it. This time feels different, said Anna Eng, an historian and lecturer at UC Berkeley who used the San Bruno facility to discover details of her own family’s history as laborers during the Chinese Exclusion Act era, and how generations of parents and children were separated during that time.
Eng said she worries President Donald Trump’s administration will be less receptive to public pleas to keep the facility open — or even stories like hers that highlight what losing access to the historical records could mean to certain communities.
“We are definitely on much more shaky ground, because of the desire to rewrite history,” Eng said.
Mullin was cautious not to overtly blame politics for the facility’s planned closure. But he acknowledged how Trump has targeted the Bay Area during his second term in what the president’s critics have characterized as acts of political retribution. He said it was important for Democrats to regain control of Congress in the November midterm elections and reclaim congressional oversight over these decisions.
Ina said she would also keep fighting to preserve the San Bruno facility. “This is a repeated effort to erase our history, our story, our place in American history,” she said. “I’m old now, and I’m tired. But I can tell you this: I will never lay down and not fight to keep this archive open.”
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