National Parks Conservation Association Lawsuit: 2026 Injunction

The National Parks Conservation Association lawsuit, filed February 17, 2026, in the U.S. District Court for the District of Massachusetts, challenges the Trump administration’s removal of historical and scientific exhibits from national parks across the country. NPCA and five partner organizations sued the Department of the Interior, Secretary Doug Burgum, and the National Park Service, and on June 12, 2026, U.S. District Judge Angel Kelley granted a preliminary injunction ordering the government to restore everything it had taken down and to stop making further changes while the case proceeds.¹²

What the Lawsuit Challenges

The case targets two directives. On March 27, 2025, President Trump signed Executive Order 14253, “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History,” which told the Interior Secretary to review monuments, memorials, markers, and similar properties and remove content that “inappropriately disparage Americans past or living” or cast the country’s founding principles in a “negative light.”³

Two months later, on May 20, 2025, Secretary Burgum issued Secretary’s Order 3431, putting the executive order into effect at the NPS. It required staff to review all interpretive materials on rolling 30-, 60-, 90-, and 120-day timelines and told parks to invite visitors to report signs that were “negative about either past or living Americans” or failed to emphasize “the beauty, grandeur, and abundance of landscapes.”⁴

What Had Been Removed

The complaint and supporting filings identified removals and flagged materials at more than two dozen park sites, covering slavery, civil rights, Indigenous history, climate science, and labor history. Notable examples:

At Independence National Historical Park in Philadelphia, the exhibit memorializing nine people enslaved by George Washington at the President’s House was torn down.⁵
At Acadia National Park in Maine, signs discussing climate change and the significance of Cadillac Mountain to the Wabanaki people were removed.⁵
At Fort Sumter in South Carolina, a display about climate change and sea-level rise was removed.⁶
At Glacier National Park in Montana, materials on climate change and disappearing glaciers were removed.⁶
At Lowell National Historical Park in Massachusetts, two films about labor history were pulled from public viewing.⁷
At Sunset Crater Volcano National Monument in Arizona, a sign describing basalt bubbles was removed because its photograph showed a visitor holding a Pride flag.⁸
Along the Selma to Montgomery National Historic Trail in Alabama, roughly 80 items related to the civil rights movement were flagged for potential removal.⁶
At Harper’s Ferry in West Virginia, more than 30 signs related to John Brown and the abolitionist movement were flagged.⁶

Online content was also scrubbed. General climate change webpages and park-specific pages at Hawai’i Volcanoes, Lake Mead, and other sites were taken down, along with references to LGBTQ+ history at Stonewall National Monument, including content about activists Marsha P. Johnson and Sylvia Rivera.⁹

The Legal Argument

The complaint claims the Secretary’s Order violates the Administrative Procedure Act because it is arbitrary and capricious and exceeds the agencies’ statutory authority. The core argument is that the directive ignored four federal statutes that require the NPS to provide accurate, high-quality scientific information and educational interpretation.¹⁰

Those statutes are the backbone of the case. The NPS Organic Act of 1916 directs the agency to “conserve the scenery, natural and historic objects, and wild life” and bars management action “in derogation of” those purposes absent specific congressional authority.¹¹ The National Parks Omnibus Management Act of 1998 requires park management to be “enhanced by the availability and utilization of a broad program of the highest quality science and information.”¹² The National Park Service Centennial Act of 2016 adds that interpretation and education must “reflect current scientific and academic research” and “reflect different cultural backgrounds, ages, education, gender, abilities, ethnicity, and needs.”⁵

NPCA is joined as a plaintiff by the American Association for State and Local History, the Association of National Park Rangers, the Coalition to Protect America’s National Parks, the Society for Experiential Graphic Design, and the Union of Concerned Scientists. Democracy Forward represents the coalition. The plaintiffs ask the court to declare Secretary’s Order 3431 unlawful, vacate it, halt further removals, and require restoration of everything already taken down.⁵

The June 2026 Preliminary Injunction

Judge Kelley first denied the government’s motion to dismiss on June 4, 2026, finding that the plaintiffs had plausibly alleged concrete injuries tied to their core organizational missions. The government had argued that the plaintiffs lacked standing, that Secretary’s Order 3431 was not “final agency action” reviewable under the APA, and that the removals fell within unreviewable internal discretion.¹³¹⁴

Eight days later, on June 12, 2026, Kelley issued a 63-page opinion granting the preliminary injunction. The order requires the administration to:

Restore all interpretive materials removed or altered since May 20, 2025;
Complete the restoration within 21 days, by July 3, 2026;
Cease all further removals; and
File weekly progress reports with the court beginning five days after the order.²⁷

Kelley grounded the ruling in statutory law rather than the First Amendment, finding conflicts with the NPS Organic Act, the Omnibus Management Act, the Centennial Act, and the APA. Applying the standard four-part preliminary injunction test, she found the plaintiffs likely to succeed on the merits, faced with irreparable harm, favored by the balance of equities, and supported by the public interest.¹⁵

On the record before her, Kelley found that the administration had offered no “reasoned explanation” for its actions, had not addressed the governing statutes, and had produced no evidence or expert reports identifying historical inaccuracies in the materials it targeted. She also noted that Secretary Burgum had never published notices in the Federal Register or consulted the public before ordering removals of this scale.¹⁵

Kelley rejected the government’s framing that it was countering ideological distortion. She wrote that the administration’s own actions “do exactly what they profess to counteract, dismantling objective historic truths and permanently damaging public memory,” and that the government had not explained how the historical contributions of marginalized groups detracted from “our extraordinary heritage.”¹⁵ Elsewhere in the opinion she wrote that “under the guise of promoting American dignity, this Administration seeks to share a limited history by ordering the removal of all signs, displays, and interpretative exhibits at National parks that do not align with its preferred narrative, thereby telling half-truths,” and characterized the approach as an attempt to “rewrite the Nation’s history with a white-out pen.”¹⁶ The government’s “stewardship of these park sites,” she wrote, “carries a responsibility to present history in full rather than in favored fragments.”²

A Parallel Ruling in Philadelphia

Kelley’s order was not the first court decision blocking the removals. In February 2026, U.S. District Judge Cynthia M. Rufe of the Eastern District of Pennsylvania granted a preliminary injunction in City of Philadelphia v. Burgum (Civil Action No. 26-434), ordering restoration of 34 educational panels about slavery at the President’s House site. Judge Rufe found that the NPS had violated a contractual “survival clause” requiring mutual consent for exhibit changes and that the government could not invoke the government-speech doctrine to unilaterally rewrite historical narratives against congressional directives.¹⁷ Kelley’s opinion cited the Philadelphia ruling on overlapping legal questions.¹⁵

Where the Case Stands

As of mid-June 2026, the preliminary injunction is in effect. The administration must complete restoration by July 3, 2026, and file weekly status reports with the court. The underlying lawsuit challenging Secretary’s Order 3431 under the APA continues, and the ruling is widely expected to be appealed.¹⁵¹⁸

1
Democracy Forward. Coalition Files Lawsuit to Challenge Censorship, Erasure of American History and Science at National Parks
2
CNN. Judge Ruling on National Park Sign Changes
3
The White House. Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History
4
Democrats – House Committee on Natural Resources. Opposition to Censorship at National Park Sites
5
Democracy Forward. Complaint, National Parks Conservation Association v. Department of the Interior
6
Democracy Forward. Examples of Censorship From National Parks Conservation Association v. Department of the Interior
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PBS NewsHour. Judge Orders Restoration of National Park Changes Made by Trump Administration
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CBS News. Trump National Park History Changes Court Ruling
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National Parks Conservation Association. Erasing History, Silencing Science
10
Bloomberg Law. Interior Department Sued Over Erasure of National Park History
11
Office of the Law Revision Counsel. 54 U.S.C. Subtitle I
12
GovInfo. National Parks Omnibus Management Act of 1998
13
CaseMine. National Parks Conservation Association v. Department of the Interior, Motion to Dismiss Ruling
14
Civil Rights Litigation Clearinghouse. National Parks Conservation Association v. Department of the Interior
15
First Amendment Encyclopedia. National Parks Conservation Association v. U.S. Department of the Interior
16
Missing Park History. Missing Park History
17
First Amendment Encyclopedia. City of Philadelphia v. Burgum
18
National Parks Conservation Association. Court Blocks Censorship and Erasure of American History and Science at National Parks