Judge says Trump admin. must reinstall slavery panels removed from historic site
Quick Summary
- A judge has ordered the Trump administration to reinstall slavery panels at a historic site in Philadelphia.
- City officials had filed a lawsuit against the Trump administration over the removal.
- 34 educational panels had been removed on Jan. 22 under an executive order.
A judge has ruled that the Trump administration must reinstall information panels detailing the history of slavery at a historic site in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
The city of Philadelphia recently filed suit against various Trump administration officials over the removal of a series of panels from Independence National Historical Park, where President George Washington lived for a time.
Named defendants included U.S. Secretary of the Interior Doug Burgum, National Park Service Acting Director Jessica Bowron, as well as the Interior Department and the National Park Service (NPS) overall.
United States District Judge Cynthia Rufe for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania, a George W. Bush appointee, granted a preliminary injunction on Monday on behalf of Philadelphia officials.
In her memorandum opinion, Rufe compared the actions of the Trump administration to the malicious efforts of the Ministry of Truth in George Orwell’s dystopian novel 1984.
Rufe wrote that “the government claims it alone has the power to erase, alter, remove and hide historical accounts on taxpayer and local government-funded monuments within its control.”
“Its claims in this regard echo Big Brother’s domain in Orwell’s 1984,” Rufe continued. “The government here likewise asserts truth is no longer self-evident, but rather the property of the elected chief magistrate and his appointees and delegees, at his whim to be scraped clean, hidden, or overwritten. And why? Solely because, as Defendants state, it has the power.”
“An agency, whether the Department of the Interior, NPS, or any other agency, cannot arbitrarily decide what is true, based on its own whims or the whims of the new leadership, regardless of the evidence before it.”
Rufe also concluded that the administration has “completely ignored their legislatively imposed duties,” having “disregarded statutory authority, compelled by Congress, by taking unilateral action without seeking agreement from the city of Philadelphia.”
“Defendants’ actions impede the separation of powers instituted by the Constitution,” she added. “Defendants acted in excess of their authority as agencies authorized by Congress within the executive branch.”
Rufe ordered the administration to “reinstall all panels, displays, and video exhibits that were previously in place” and to “prevent any additions, removals, destruction, or further changes of any kind to the President’s House site, except in the event that a mutual written agreement is reached between Defendants and the city of Philadelphia.”
On Jan. 22, 2026, NPS removed 34 educational panels that referenced slavery and deactivated the accompanying video presentations at the historic site.
The stated reason for the action was an executive order from March of last year titled “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History,” which claimed that, in recent years, “Americans have witnessed a concerted and widespread effort to rewrite our nation’s history, replacing objective facts with a distorted narrative driven by ideology rather than truth.”
For its part, the Interior Department stated that the panels were removed because federal agencies were mandated to review such materials to “ensure accuracy, honesty, and alignment with shared national values,” The Associated Press reported.
The decision to remove the panels was met with much backlash, with city officials filing a lawsuit against Trump administration officials.
