California has gone to federal court to stop the National Archives from shutting its San Bruno facility and shipping its holdings to sites in other states.
Attorney General Rob Bonta filed the suit on Wednesday, Oct. 14, in the Northern District of California's federal court. The complaint contends that the agency's choice to close the site, which carries the San Francisco name despite its San Bruno address, was arbitrary and capricious under the Administrative Procedure Act.
It asks a judge to vacate the closure decision and to bar any transfer of records out of the building.
What is in the building
According to the attorney general's office, the San Bruno site holds a collection of over 75,000 cubic feet, drawn from federal offices in Northern and Central California as well as Hawaii, Guam, American Samoa and much of Nevada, with some files dating to 1850.
The collection includes Chinese Exclusion Act-era immigration files, court and prison records, Indian boarding school records, and files tied to Japanese American incarceration during World War II, among them the Fred Korematsu case.
The state says fewer than 4% of National Archives records nationwide have been digitized, so much of the material can only be seen in person. Its filing cites California State Parks staff, who it says visited the archive more than 10 times while researching the Angel Island barracks, and a UC Berkeley professor who sends students there.
"These records belong here, and I'll fight to keep them here," Bonta said in a statement.
The agency's plan
The complaint says the agency told employees in June that the San Francisco and Chicago facilities would close within a few years. In August, it posted a plan to split the San Bruno holdings among its facilities in Riverside, Denver, College Park, Fort Worth and Kansas City, with Denver taking the largest share.
NASA records were set to go to Fort Worth first, and the complaint says they became unavailable to the public on Oct. 13.
