Judge blasts Trump’s ‘censorship’ of national parks and museums – Courthouse News
Wednesday, April 23, 2025
A federal judge in Massachusetts ordered the Department of the Interior to restore displays removed from national parks, pursuant to the president’s crackdown on diversity, equity and inclusion.
(CN) — President Donald Trump’s controversial executive order to selectively strip national parks of educational information sets a “dangerous precedent of censorship and sanitization,” according to a federal judge.
U.S. District Judge Angel Kelley has ordered the government to restore the information it removed, siding with a group of scientific and historical groups that sued the Department of the Interior for “erasing history” by removing exhibits it dislikes from the nation’s museums, parks and landmarks.
“It bears emphasizing that the public ultimately bears the brunt of defendants’ actions,” Kelley wrote in a 63-page order, docketed Friday. “Everyday park visitors — young, old, and from all backgrounds — look to the national park system to learn and enhance their understanding of history, science, and this nation. Defendants’ continued censorship of interpretive materials disfavored by this administration diminishes the public’s collective ability to engage critically and thoughtfully with these topics.”
Kelley, a Joe Biden appointee in Massachusetts federal court, agreed with the plaintiffs’ assertion that Trump’s 2025 executive order “erases the history of countless people.”
It also “alienates communities from public spaces, limits the availability of scientific information relevant to ensuring the long-term preservation of the parks themselves and impairs the mission of the [National Parks Service] to preserve the parks ‘for the enjoyment, education and inspiration of this and future generations,” the judge ruled.
Kelley granted the suing groups a preliminary injunction that orders the government to restore information it pulled from museums and parks around the country. It also bars the administration from making any further changes to these sites.
The Interior Department has until July 4 to make these restorations — the judge said it is important that “our shared history be honestly told and fully restored by the 250th anniversary” of the United States.
“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,” Kelley wrote. “Indeed, at a time of facts and alternative facts, the only thing we must be able to rely on as undeniable truth is history. And telling the full truths of our shared story helps our nation heal from past wrongs, rather than prolonging us.”
With its efforts, the Trump administration sought to “rewrite the nation’s history with a white-out pen,” Kelley said.
A spokesperson for the Interior Department did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Monday.
Groups including the National Parks Conservation Association, the Association of National Park Rangers and the Union of Concerned Scientists filed their lawsuit in February, targeting a memo from Interior Secretary Doug Burgum that demanded National Park Service employees to “immediately undertake” action to remove disfavored information.
Burgum’s memo was based on a 2025 executive order from Trump, who promised to strip national sites of “corrosive ideology” he claimed permeated through Democratic administrations before him.
In practice, this resulted in the National Park Service removing exhibits from museums and national parks that focused on topics like slavery and climate change.
At Philadelphia’s Independence National Historical Park, the government tore down an exhibit memorializing George Washington’s slaves. At Fort Sumter in South Carolina, it removed signage detailing climate threats.
These actions represent an unprecedented politicization in the upkeep of national parks, the groups claim, which has historically been a nonpartisan operation run by Congress, not the executive.
“The federal government has now betrayed that trust,” the groups argue in their suit. They’re being represented by Democracy Forward, a left-leaning legal nonprofit that has locked horns with the Trump administration in court previously.
The Interior Department, too, has been at the center of other lawsuits centered on Trump’s influence. In the Southern District of New York, a group of LGBTQ+ advocates also sued the agency in February for removing a pride flag at the historic Stonewall National Monument in Manhattan. But the government settled that case in April and agreed to restore the iconic emblem.
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