California Attorney General sued the National Archives and Records Administration on Oct. 14 to stop it from closing the National Archives at San Francisco, a federal records center in San Bruno, and moving its holdings to other facilities around the country.
The facility holds more than 75,000 cubic feet of records from federal agencies in Northern and Central California, Hawaii, most of Nevada, Guam and American Samoa, according to the attorney general’s office. They include immigration, court, inmate and genealogical records, Indian boarding school records, immigration case files from the Chinese Exclusion Act era, and Japanese American internment case records, including those from Fred Korematsu’s challenge to his World War II arrest.
NARA told San Francisco staff in a June 2026 email that it planned to close the facility, along with the Chicago archives, in the next few years and would start moving records “within the next few months,” the attorney general’s office said. In August, NARA said on its website that the San Francisco records would go to five different National Archives facilities. The first transfer, of NASA records to the National Archives facility in Fort Worth, could begin as soon as this week, the office said.
State agencies rely on the San Bruno records for legally required research, according to the office. California State Parks and its contractors visited the archives more than ten times while refurbishing the Angel Island barracks to research how the original facility was built, and the office said pending State Parks projects on Angel Island and elsewhere could not be finished if the records were unavailable. UC Berkeley professor Andrew Leong regularly sends students there to research Asian American history and language using material available only in person.
Less than 4% of National Archives records nationwide are digitized, and some are too fragile to digitize without risking damage, the office said.
The suit, filed in U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, argues the closure and transfers are arbitrary and capricious in violation of the Administrative Procedure Act. Bonta is asking the court to vacate NARA’s decision and bar transfers of records out of the San Bruno facility.
“California won’t stand idly by while the Trump Administration hauls away records that tell the stories of generations of immigrants, Tribal communities, and California families,” Bonta said. “The San Francisco National Archives holds records going back to 1850, when California was just becoming a state.”
The attorney general’s release did not include a response from NARA or explain the agency’s reasons for the closure.
State
Rob Bonta
Attorney General · Democrat
Named once in this story.
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