Top image: National Archives San Bruno facility, 1974. Photo: U.S. National Archives (public domain) via Wikimedia Commons
In San Bruno sits one of the Bay Area’s least visible civic assets: the National Archives at San Francisco. Its 75,000-plus cubic feet of federal records cover Northern and Central California, Hawaii, most of Nevada, Guam, and American Samoa. This week it became the center of a federal-state legal fight over who controls access to the region’s history.
The lawsuit
On Wednesday, Oct. 14, California Attorney General Rob Bonta sued the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California. The suit seeks to block the facility’s closure and the transfer of its holdings to other NARA sites around the country. It argues that the decision was arbitrary and capricious under the Administrative Procedure Act and was made without regard for the state, tribes, and others who rely on the records. Bonta is asking the court to vacate the closure decision and bar any transfer of records.
“These records belong here, and I’ll fight to keep them here,” Bonta said in the announcement.
According to the attorney general’s office, NARA employees were told by email in June that the San Francisco and Chicago facilities would close within the next few years, with records moving “within the next few months.” In August, NARA said online that the San Francisco holdings would be split among five facilities. The first transfers, starting with NASA records bound for Fort Worth, could begin as soon as the week of the filing, the office said.
What’s in the boxes
The collection includes immigration, court, prison, and genealogical records, the AG’s office said. Among them are Indian boarding school files, Chinese Exclusion Act-era immigration case files, and records on Japanese American incarceration, including the case of Fred Korematsu. The state says the archive also has practical uses. California State Parks and its contractors visited more than 10 times while refurbishing the Angel Island barracks, and UC Berkeley classes use the collection in person. Less than 4% of NARA’s records nationwide are digitized, according to the AG’s office.
The Peninsula’s congressman
Rep. Kevin Mullin (CA-15), whose district includes San Bruno, welcomed the suit the same day. Mullin said NARA “failed to conduct any kind of public input process” before deciding to relocate “fragile, sensitive documents over 1,500 miles away.” He said he would keep pushing his National Archives Protection Act and would also try to block the closure through the federal budget process. His office noted that San Bruno and Chicago are two of 13 regional archives nationwide, and that NARA had responded dismissively to a letter he co-authored with Rep. Judy Chu and 37 other lawmakers.
The long view
The fight is about more than one building. As federal agencies consolidate physical facilities and rely on digitization that, by NARA’s own figures, covers only a small share of the record, access to primary sources is moving away from the communities those records describe. The Bay Area knows this problem well. Its economy runs on data, yet much of its own documentary history still sits on paper in a single San Bruno facility. The outcome will help decide whether regional archives are treated as infrastructure or as overhead.
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