A CALL TO ACTION: SAVE OUR NATIONAL ARCHIVES
saveournationalarchives.org
Our National Archives Are Being Taken Out of Public Reach
On June 23, 2026, the National Archives and Records Administration quietly informed its own employees, not the public (NARA Notice 2026-037) of a plan to close the National Archives at Chicago and San Bruno, CA and to relocate their holdings to up to 12 different facilities spread across the country. The Chicago facility serves the people of Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, Minnesota, Ohio, and Wisconsin. San Bruno serves northern and central California, Nevada, Hawaii, and the Pacific territories. Tens of millions of Americans are about to lose their regional window into the federal records including the actual Immigration and Naturalization records from all these areas.
This is not a routine matter of facilities management, and it should not be treated as one. The regional archives are not a real estate line item to be trimmed in pursuit of a leaner portfolio. They are public infrastructure of the most fundamental kind — the places where the American people go to examine the documentary record of their own government and their own families. When a regional archive closes, the federal government does not merely vacate a building. It withdraws from the people of an entire region their practical ability to see the evidence of their history. That is a loss no efficiency calculation can justify, and it demands the immediate attention of both the Archivist and the Congress.
These are not warehouses of duplicate paperwork. The vast majority of the records in Chicago and San Bruno are paper originals that exist nowhere else on earth. They have not been digitized; most of them, given their volume, fragility, and condition, cannot be digitized on any realistic timeline. For these records, the building is the access.
What is at stake in Chicago is the recorded life of the American heartland. The Chicago facility preserves 140,000 cubic feet of archival material recording the maritime logs, customs records, and lighthouse and life-saving service files that document commerce and catastrophe on the Great Lakes — the freshwater arteries on which the industrial Midwest was built. It holds records of federal relations with Native nations across the Great Lakes region: enrollment records, agency correspondence, and treaty-era documentation that tribal governments and citizens rely upon today for enrollment, land, and sovereignty matters. And it safeguards the federal court and agency records that chronicle the great labor history of the Midwest such as Pullman, Haymarket-era prosecutions, the steel and stockyard organizing drives, the litigation through which working people secured their rights. These are not regional curiosities.
As of October 13th, NARA will begin moving records out of state. The first ones scheduled are the Railroad Retirement Board records – even though the organization is headquartered in Chicago. Others to be moved include the NASA records from the John Glenn Research Center.
The NARA at Chicago collection also contains:
- Immigration and Naturalization records since 1929
- Bureau of Indian Affairs tribal and census records
- Chinese Exclusion Act records
- The Maritime and Coast Guard disaster records of the Great Lakes
- Original Federal Court records of all six states going back to 1800
What We Are Asking You to Do
- Circulate this alert to your full membership, your boards, your newsletters, and your partner organizations. Speed matters: relocation activity could begin immediately.
- Write to your senators and representatives. Demand three things: a halt to all relocation until genuine public consultations are held in both regions; congressional action to fund a real regional archives system; and full transparency on where every record group is going.
Personal letters describing how you and your organizational use of these records are the
most powerful tool we have.
- Find your U.S. Representative by ZIP code: https://www.house.gov/representatives/find-your-representative
- Contact your U.S. Senators (listed by state): https://www.senate.gov/senators/senators-contact.htm
- Full member directory with committee assignments: https://www.congress.gov/members
- At the very least, sign the petition at https://www.change.org/p/stop-the-closure-of-the-national-archives-at-chicago. Or use the QR code below to link to the Petition with your cellphone camera.
The National Archives was founded on a radical and simple idea: that in a democracy, the government's records are the people's property, and the people must be able to see them. A national archive that retreats from the nation, that consolidates the public's history into a handful of distant buildings, keeps the paper but breaks the promise. We are not asking for anything new. We are asking that a promise made to every American, be kept, in perpetuity.
© 2026, copyright Illinois State Genealogical Society
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