Originally published on September 24, 2026 by NBC News and written by Scott Wong.
Democratic lawmakers and local activists are scrambling to stop the closure of a National Archives and Records Administration facility here, which houses more than 750,000 federal immigration, genealogical and Alcatraz penitentiary records.
They include culturally sensitive archival material treasured by the Asian American, Native Hawaiian and Pacific Islander community: records related to the Chinese Exclusion Act, Angel Island Immigration Station and Japanese American mass incarceration during World War II, as well as Native American census records.
The Leo J. Ryan Memorial Federal Building, a 53-year-old brutalist concrete structure, doesn’t look like much.
But “it really is a treasure trove of records, and it tells the history of this country. It tells the history, in many ways, of the Bay Area region,” Rep. Kevin Mullin, D-Calif., said in an interview in his local office in nearby San Mateo.
“These kinds of records that have such historical value need to be preserved in their current state,” said Mullin, whose district includes the NARA facility. “And they need to be preserved where families who are affected here can access them.”
Dating back to the Clinton administration, NARA has pushed to save money and reduce its physical footprint across the country as it digitizes its billions of paper records. Under the Obama administration, NARA closed its facility in Anchorage, Alaska, including a research room, in 2014. Other small facilities shuttered their doors during the Biden years.
But the Trump administration set off alarm bells in the AANHPI and Native American communities this summer when NARA Chief Operating Officer Jay Trainer sent an email to employees announcing that the agency will close its facilities in the San Francisco Bay Area and Chicago and move all temporary records from its Seattle Federal Records Center. The move would begin within months, he said.
The decision was made with no public hearings, stakeholder meetings or congressional input, opponents said.
Trainer wrote that while the changes may be “unsettling” to employees, they reduce the agency’s real estate portfolio, cut expenses and allow NARA to “maintain our core mission and functions while improving efficiency and effectiveness,” according to a copy of the email obtained by NBC News.
Lawmakers, however, are questioning whether the Trump administration is targeting facilities in deep-blue regions of the country. And news of the closures comes as Democrats accuse President Donald Trump and his administration of trying to rewrite or erase ugly parts of American history, including replacing an exhibit on slavery at the site of George Washington’s home in Philadelphia and accusing the Smithsonian Institution of pursuing a “divisive, race-centered ideology.”
Now, Congress is getting more involved in the NARA fight. Mullin and Rep. Judy Chu, D-Calif., chair emerita of the Congressional Asian Pacific American Caucus, led a letter signed by nearly 40 members of Congress, including Republican Mark Amodei of Nevada, urging NARA to scrap its closure plans. Sens. Catherine Cortez Masto and Jacky Rosen, both Nevada Democrats, signed on, as did Sen. Tammy Duckworth, D-Ill. Mullin has also introduced legislation that would require NARA to go to Congress first before shutting down any of its facilities.
Should they take back control of the House in November, Mullin and other Democrats said they will use the “power of the purse” and oversight powers to try to stop the closures.
“Certainly, from the AANHPI perspective, this is where so many first came. My grandfather came in 1904 to San Francisco, and I would hate to see any records that there were on his arrival to be lost or to be inaccessible because it’s moved,” Chu, the first Chinese American woman elected to Congress, told NBC News.
“People might think that this is an obscure issue because it’s about archives and it’s the storage materials, but it means a lot to so many families. This is all about their history and uncovering the details behind it,” Chu said.
In their letter, lawmakers asked for a response to several questions about the closures by Sept. 18, but NARA officials have not responded. NARA and the White House also did not respond to emails from NBC News seeking comment about the status of the planned closures.
NARA’s website said early Immigration and Naturalization Service records, including those from the Chinese Exclusion Act, would be moved to Kansas City, Missouri. A federal notice to potential vendors said work could begin as soon as this month.
But if records were relocated there, it would be an enormous setback for academic researchers, genealogists and community members digging into their family history, said Grant Din, a leader of Save Our National Archives, a coalition of nonprofit groups and individuals fighting the San Bruno closure.
A genealogist who has done research at the San Bruno facility more than 50 times, Din said it would take far too long to digitize all of the records, some of which are nearly 150 years old and very fragile.
“When I come here, I almost always see another descendant of someone looking for an ancestor in the files here, spending a lot of time going through every single page,” Din continued. “And I can touch a paper that my great-great-grandfather signed in 1905, and he was born in 1850. So before that, I had no idea what he even looked like. But his file was here, and I can actually touch that.”
Din is one of roughly 500 researchers who visit the facility each year, accessing about 3,000 records in total, lawmakers said.
Din noted it would be costly for researchers to travel to Kansas City; right now, he can take BART public transit.
“It’ll be very hard to get them. You’ll have to file a work request. Very few people are going to go to Kansas City, file a work request, wait to see if they have it in storage,” Din said as he stood in front of the NARA facility.
Laura Ng, an assistant professor of anthropology at Grinnell College in Iowa, has done research at the San Bruno site as she works to reconstruct what life was like in late 19th- and early 20th-century Chinatowns. She said the archivists there are extremely knowledgeable and an invaluable resource.
“From railroad work to those who were merchants to those who were court interpreters and farmers … we hardly have any diaries or even like firsthand accounts of what their lives were like,” Ng said of the immigrants. “So, the archaeology and these immigration files — they’re important sources of data that, when used together, help us tell a story of what was life like.”
The San Bruno repository includes thousands of case files of individuals who were affected by the Chinese Exclusion Act, which Congress passed in 1882, banning all Chinese laborers from immigrating to the U.S. Among them are court and immigration records related to United States v. Wong Kim Ark, the landmark 1898 Supreme Court ruling that established that a man born in the U.S. to Chinese immigrant parents was an American citizen under the 14th Amendment.
Transcripts of interrogations by immigration officials at Angel Island, known as the Ellis Island of the West, can be found there, too.
Built in 1973, the San Bruno facility is also home to case files for Issei, first-generation Japanese immigrants who were barred by federal law from becoming naturalized citizens and were imprisoned with their families in mass U.S. incarceration camps after Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor.
The NARA offices are just a few blocks away from the historical site of the Tanforan Assembly Center, the horse track where roughly 8,000 Japanese Americans were temporarily forced to live in 1942 while the government built more permanent detention camps. A memorial is erected on the site of the former assembly center.
“I don’t want to come off as a Luddite here. The reality is I understand we need to digitize records. We need to modernize the way we manage these things,” Mullin said. “But what I’ve heard is there’s discussion of moving these records to a facility in the Midwest, and I really think much of our history is at risk of being erased here.”
Other lawmakers said they didn’t trust the Trump administration and questioned whether some of the records would be discarded or even survive a move.
“I think that there’s a real question that people have about whether there’s any reality that they would save any of it or keep any of it, even if they said they were moving it,” said Rep. Pramila Jayapal, D-Wash., who has been following the issue. “But I also think there’s some issues with some of the documents being moved because they’re very sensitive. They’re very old, and so if you just try to move them, it’s not that easy.”
Rep. Jonathan Jackson, a Chicago Democrat, was equally skeptical about relocating the records: “I wouldn’t trust them if they say they’re going to move them. … It’ll be very convenient for them to say they lost them.”
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