Twenty-eight years ago, a volunteer coalition of genealogists and community historians stopped the federal government from emptying the National Archives in San Bruno. This summer they learned — from a leaked internal email, not a public notice — that they would have to do it all over again.

The Trump administration's plan to shutter the National Archives at San Francisco, the San Bruno facility that holds well over a century of West Coast immigration records, is drawing organized resistance from the same group that fought and won this battle in 1998: Save Our National Archives. What its members say is different this time is the absence of any public process — the closure surfaced through an employee memo, and the agency has never formally explained where the records go, when, or why. For descendants whose family histories live in those file boxes, the fight is not abstract.

The first anyone outside the government heard of it was a leaked memo. An internal June email from NARA chief operating officer Jay Trainer told employees the agency would shut its San Bruno and Chicago facilities to cut costs and shrink its real-estate footprint, NBC Bay Area reported↗ (external source, opens in a new tab), and said nothing about the fate of the workers who staff them. NARA's public website offers only that the San Bruno site is closing "in the next few years." There was no announcement.

That silence has galvanized the people who know the building best. Save Our National Archives — SONA — first formed in 1998, when the agency last moved to consolidate San Bruno's holdings and send them toward Missouri. The volunteers prevailed then. According to the group's action alert circulated by the California Genealogical Society↗ (external source, opens in a new tab), it has worked since that year to keep the records publicly accessible, and it warns that the latest transfer could begin as soon as this month.

SONA reconstituted itself within days of the memo leaking. It has mounted a letter-writing campaign aimed at the acting archivist, and member Grant Din told NBC Bay Area that an accompanying petition had already drawn close to 7,000 signatures.

What sits inside the Leo J. Ryan Federal Building resists relocation. NBC Bay Area described records more than a century old, among them Native American boarding-school files, Chinese immigration papers from the Exclusion era, and pages from an Alcatraz warden's notebook. SONA's own inventory adds Chinese Exclusion case files, Angel Island arrivals, Japanese, German and Italian American internment records, Hawaiian citizenship papers, and naturalization files for immigrants from more than eighty countries. Rep. Kevin Mullin, who toured the facility, said the documents "have to be preserved here."

For some researchers, the archive is where they found out who they are. Sandra Wong learned she descends from Wong Kim Ark — the San Francisco-born man whose 1898 Supreme Court case cemented birthright citizenship — only after requesting her father's file in San Bruno, which held a childhood photograph of him she had never seen. Another SONA member, Leona Lau, surfaced a naturalization record her great-grandfather had obtained in Hawaii generations ago, the thread that showed her she was the first in her family born on U.S. soil.

The political response is building. Mullin and Rep. Judy Chu are circulating a letter to NARA — signed by nearly 40 members of Congress — that asks whether the agency followed required procedure, and Mullin is drafting legislation to require congressional approval before any archive closes.

What stings, coalition members say, is the method. The last time the archive was threatened, they had a proposal on the table to argue against. This time they have a leaked email — and a plan whose particulars the government still hasn't disclosed.