A federal court on Friday ordered the National Park Service to restore exhibits related to topics including slavery, women’s suffrage, Native Tribes, and climate change that the Trump administration has removed from national parks and barred NPS from removing or changing interpretive materials going forward.
In March 2025, President Donald Trump signed an executive order directing the park service to remove interpretive materials that “inappropriately disparage Americans.”
Citing that order, NPS has removed or identified for removal hundreds of signs, displays, and interpretive exhibits related to climate change, civil rights, and diverse communities. As the court explained:
In recent months, the Government has torn down exhibits in Philadelphia’s Independence National Historical Park memorializing the legacy of people enslaved by the country’s first President; removed signage detailing climate threats at Fort Sumter in South Carolina, one of the most environmentally endangered sites in the country; and wiped away descriptions of history and science at countless National Parks across the United States.
More than 500 items have been flagged for removal, including an iconic photograph at Fort Pulaski National Park in Georgia that exposed the brutal violence of slavery.
A coalition of groups—the National Parks Conservation Association, American Association for State and Local History, Association of National Park Rangers, Coalition to Protect America’s National Parks, Society for Experiential Graphic Design, and Union of Concerned Scientists—sued NPS to block the removals, arguing the agency’s actions are arbitrary and capricious in violation of federal law.
In a 63-page order, the U.S. District Court for Massachusetts wrote that the administration’s efforts “to rewrite the Nation’s history with a white-out pen” set a “dangerous precedent of censorship and sanitization.”
“Under the guise of promoting American dignity,” the court wrote, “this Administration seeks to share a limited history by ordering the removal of all signs, displays, and interpretive exhibits at National Parks that do not align with its preferred narrative, thereby telling half-truths.”
In evaluating whether to grant the plaintiff’s request for a preliminary injunction, the court observed that NPS did not provide “any reasoned justification for its directive to review and remove interpretive material” beyond saying it was implementing the executive order.
NPS not only failed to explain its actions, the court found, but it also refused to address evidence of widespread disapproval among the very public that the National Parks were established to serve.
Polls and surveys demonstrate “overwhelming, bipartisan support for telling the whole, unbiased history of this Nation.” Thousands of visitors used QR codes at the parks to criticize the removal of interpretive materials.
The court also pointed to a 2026 Pew Research Center survey reporting that 66% of all U.S. adults believe it is “extremely or very important to publicly discuss [both] the country’s historical successes and strengths” as well as “the country’s historical failures and flaws.”
Federal courts must hold agencies “accountable to the public,” the court reasoned. A “cursory and conclusory citation” to the executive order is not sufficient to satisfy the requirement of “reasoned decisionmaking,” the court concluded, writing:
A unilateral, unreasoned, and lawless Executive Order of a President cannot be the sole justification for an agency’s actions, lest the country be prepared to entrust its future to the whims of a single individual.
The court ordered NPS to restore all park sites to how they existed prior to May 2025 and prohibit NPS from making any further alterations in order to prevent irreparable harm to the American people. The court explained:
The weight of this harm bears emphasizing. These park sites are deeply meaningful for many people for multifaceted reasons. The now-removed materials were the product of years of care, stewardship, community collaboration, and public engagement. They commemorate the people who have lived, worked, and died in this Nation; serve as a tribute to their contributions to the ideals of freedom, democracy, and equity; and represent an enduring reminder of the inherent contradictions in our Nation’s history.
Their removal constitutes government-sanctioned erasure and rejection of their histories. It strips the sites of the context that gives them meaning. It degrades the public’s trust in the government, as the Executive Order ignores congressional directives and carelessly razes decades of efforts in the pursuit of its unilateral agenda. These harms are, in all senses of the word, irreparable.
The court gave NPS 21 days to restore and reinstall all interpretive materials at park sites.
History cannot be faithfully told while excluding the experiences of communities whose contributions, struggles, and achievements form an important part of our Nation’s story. Indeed, at a time of facts and alternative facts, the only thing we must be able to rely on as undeniable truth is history.
By setting July 3 as the deadline for restoring the interpretive materials, the court underscored that it is “important that our shared history be honestly told and fully restored by the 250th Anniversary to properly honor the remarkable achievements of the United States.”
The Trump administration filed an appeal on Monday evening to block the court’s order.