The following are excerpts from SONA's 6/28/26 Press Release:

By Anna Eng and Grant Din, SONA Communications Co-Chairs

NATIONAL ARCHIVES IN SAN BRUNO THREATENED WITH IMMEDIATE CLOSURE;
ACTION ALERT TO COMMUNITY MEMBERS AND ORGANIZATIONS

Save Our National Archives (SONA) is working to prevent the imminent closure of the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) San Francisco center in San Bruno, California and also opposes the closure of its site in Chicago, Illinois. The NARA website states that the San Bruno facility will be closed within three years and we understand the move could begin as soon as this August, 2026. SONA has been involved since 1998 to ensure continued public access to these vital archival documents at the San Bruno location. These are invaluable resources, important to the region and the communities documented in them and should not be removed from the region and moved anywhere, in effect cutting off researchers and public access to these vital sources of American history.

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Direct access to the physical documents and artifacts often belonging to families and communities in these case files is critical, as are the expert staff in San Bruno who are extremely knowledgeable about the holdings and how and where to locate items. Many of the documents are large and fragile, and digitization is unfeasible and would damage them. Within these archives are personal family photographs, family letters, maps of home villages, original wedding, marriage, and birth certificates from countries of origin, tribal artifacts of Native Americans and Native Hawaiian communities, and other sources of community history.

Long-standing agreements between the National Archives and the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services were made to ensure that historical documents and artifacts important to family history will be made available to the public and not moved from the San Bruno location. This must continue to hold true. To make these materials inordinately inaccessible to the American people would be a violation of the Freedom of Information Act and to make them disproportionately unavailable to the communities from whose histories they document would be a violation of the 14th Amendment for Equal Protection under the Law.

With concerns that files may be moved soon, SONA has launched an immediate letter writing campaign to contact the Archives and is asking writers and organizations to CC their Congressional representatives and ask them to take immediate action. (If possible, email a copy of your letter to us at saveournationalarchives@gmail.com).

Please express your opposition by writing to:

Edward Forst, Acting Archivist of the United States
National Archives and Records Administration
8601 Adelphi Road
College Park, MD 20740-6001

email : ArchivistOfTheUnitedStates@nara.gov

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To read a KQED article from June 26, 2026: follow this link.