Lawmakers battle National Archives over plans to move historical Asian American records

September 24 2026 Lawmakers battle National Archives over plans to move historical Asian American records Home / Media / Uncategorized 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 Archiv