The federal government's blueprint for the National Archives at San Bruno is blunt: pack up more than a century of West Coast immigration files and move them roughly 1,800 miles east to St. Louis. Rep. Kevin Mullin's answer is a bill that would make NARA get Congress's permission first.

The National Archives and Records Administration is moving to close its San Bruno (officially the National Archives at San Francisco) and Chicago facilities — two of just 13 regional archives nationwide — and to relocate records tied to a third, in Seattle. The agency frames it as cost-cutting, but the plan surfaced only through a leaked internal email. For the Bay Area, the stakes are specific: the San Bruno building is the primary home of Chinese Exclusion, Angel Island, Japanese incarceration and tribal records, and the relocation could begin as soon as next month. Historians, archivists and lawmakers are now racing to stop it before the boxes start moving.

The closure was never publicly announced. It came to light through an internal NARA staff email obtained in June by the trade outlet Federal News Network and compiled by the library-advocacy group Free Government Information↗ (external source, opens in a new tab). The agency's stated reasons: trimming costs and shrinking its real-estate footprint. What the email did not spell out, the group notes, is what becomes of the employees — or how the public keeps reaching records that were never meant to leave the region.

The relocation math is where the alarm sharpens. Under the plan, San Bruno's holdings would be trucked to the Midwest, with San Francisco's collection specifically slated for St. Louis. That building is not a warehouse of duplicates. It holds roughly 100,000 cubic feet of permanent records reaching back to the 1850s. Among them: hundreds of thousands of immigration and naturalization files touching more than eighty countries, one of the deepest troves of Chinese Exclusion-era Angel Island cases anywhere, tribal documents from across the region, citizenship and birth records out of Hawaii, land claims from the Mexican era, and internment files covering German, Italian and Japanese immigrants alike.

Pulling the collection out of the region, Jacobs of Free Government Information wrote, would sharply undercut access for the communities most likely to need the files — a hardship, he argued, on the people the records were created to serve.

For Japanese American families, the specifics are stark. The National Japanese American Historical Society↗ (external source, opens in a new tab) counts some 9,711 files at the San Francisco branch for people born in Japan, alongside the district-court record in Korematsu v. U.S., the Abo v. Clark renunciation cases argued by attorney Wayne Collins, picture-bride case files and citizenship-renunciation records. The organization's position is that scanning is no substitute — digitization, it argues, cannot stand in for physical access to the originals.

The process itself has drawn a rare, unified rebuke from the field. Three national bodies — the Council of State Archivists, the Society of American Archivists and NAGARA, which represents government records administrators — came out together against shutting the regional centers, in a statement surfaced by Free Government Information↗ (external source, opens in a new tab).

The political fight has moved fast from complaint to legislation. Mullin's office announced on Aug. 20 that he had introduced the National Archives Protection Act, a measure that would bar NARA from shutting down any of its archives or records centers without a vote in Congress. Its co-authors, per that announcement, are Chu; Rep. Pramila Jayapal, whose Seattle district covers the third targeted site; and Rep. Jesús "Chuy" García, whose Chicago district covers another. Mullin and Chu have also assembled a 37-member group, from both parties and both chambers, pressing NARA to say where the records are headed and whether it followed the procedure the law requires.

Chu, who co-authored the measure, called the relocation "an unacceptable barrier to public access" and warned that families would be forced to travel across the country, at real cost, to reach records of their own American histories.

The clock is the problem. Advocates warn some materials could start moving as early as September 2026 — well before a letter gets a reply or a bill gets a hearing. The San Bruno branch is open to the public by appointment, and for the descendants who go there to prove an ancestor passed through Angel Island or to trace a family's incarceration during World War II, the unanswered question is the one that matters most: once the records are in Missouri, who here still gets to see them.