A federal judge appointed by Joe Biden issued a preliminary injunction Friday ordering the Trump administration to reverse the removal of exhibits and interpretive materials at national parks across the country and halt any further changes while legal challenges proceed.
U.S. District Judge Angel Kelley, seated in Massachusetts and placed on the federal bench by Biden in 2021, accused the administration of attempting "to rewrite the Nation's history with a white-out pen." She ordered the Interior Department to file weekly status reports detailing its progress in restoring the affected materials.
The ruling strikes at the heart of President Trump's March 27, 2025 executive order titled "Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History," which directed the Interior Department to ensure that government descriptions and depictions at parks and monuments do not "inappropriately disparage Americans past or living" and instead "focus on the greatness" of America. The order described national parks and monuments as having been "changed to perpetuate a false reconstruction of American history" in the period following the 2020 riots.
Interior Secretary Doug Burgum moved to carry out the president's directive by ordering the removal of what he called "improper partisan ideology" from museums, monuments, landmarks, and other public exhibits under federal control. Fox News Digital reported that the removed materials included an exhibit at Philadelphia's Independence National Historical Park describing George Washington's ownership of enslaved people, signage at Fort Sumter in South Carolina detailing climate threats, a sign at Arizona's Sunset Crater Volcano National Monument featuring an image of a visitor holding a Pride flag, and films about labor history at Lowell National Historical Park in Massachusetts.
Burgum did not hold back about what he found when he took the helm at Interior.
"What we were left, like virtually every Cabinet agency, was a complete mess from the Biden administration. They were doing everything from climate extremism to DEI, ESG, you name it, and they were doing it all opposed to what the American people voted for and what President Trump promised the American people we would do."
He described the department's work as "cleaning up the mess that's been left with us." The Interior Department has also cut dozens of progressive group partnerships and pulled millions in funding as part of a broader rollback of Biden-era priorities.
Kelley framed the administration's actions in stark terms, writing that the removals set a "dangerous precedent of censorship and sanitization." Her injunction stated:
"Under the guise of promoting American dignity, this administration seeks to share a limited history by ordering the removal of all signs, displays, and interpretive exhibits at National Parks that do not align with its preferred narrative, thereby telling half-truths."
That language is worth pausing over. A single district judge in Massachusetts has now declared that the executive branch, acting through a duly confirmed Cabinet secretary carrying out a signed executive order, cannot decide which materials appear in federally operated exhibits. The injunction does not merely delay the changes. It compels the administration to reverse them and submit weekly compliance reports to her court.
The plaintiffs who brought the challenge are not identified in available reporting. Nor is the case name or docket number clear from the record. What is clear is the scope of the order: a sweeping judicial override of executive discretion over the content of government-run displays.
The Interior Department wasted no time signaling it would fight. A spokesperson dismissed the ruling bluntly: "This ruling is from a liberal activist judge." The department said it was reviewing its options to appeal.
The spokesperson added, with no small amount of defiance, that the department would "celebrate UFC Freedom 250 on the South Lawn of the White House this weekend in honor of our nation's 250th with the greatest president in the history of our country, President Donald J. Trump." That event, part of the broader America 250 celebrations set to crescendo on July 4, itself survived a last-minute legal challenge in another federal courtroom.
Burgum spoke to Fox News' Kayleigh McEnany on "Saturday in America" to discuss the broader Interior agenda, including cutting Biden-era grants.
Trump's executive order laid out a clear position. "Museums in our nation's capital should be places where individuals go to learn, not to be subjected to ideological indoctrination or divisive narratives that distort our shared history," the order stated. It directed Interior to "take action, as appropriate and consistent with applicable law."
The administration's view is that the Biden era turned national parks into vehicles for progressive messaging, climate alarmism, identity politics, and historical narratives designed to cast America in the worst possible light. The removals at Fort Sumter, Independence Hall, Sunset Crater, and Lowell were the tangible result of that policy correction.
Judge Kelley sees it differently. She treated the removals as censorship, not curation. But the distinction matters. Federal parks are government property, managed by a government agency, under the direction of a presidentially appointed and Senate-confirmed secretary. The exhibits are not private speech. They are government speech, shaped by the priorities of whoever holds the executive pen.
The pattern of judges intervening in politically charged disputes over National Park Service decisions is becoming familiar. In each case, the judiciary inserts itself into what would ordinarily be routine administrative discretion, the kind of discretion that prior administrations exercised freely when they installed the very materials now at issue.
No federal judge blocked the Obama or Biden administrations when they added climate messaging to Fort Sumter signage or installed an exhibit at Independence Hall foregrounding Washington's slaveholding. Those were treated as normal curatorial choices. But when a Republican president reverses those choices, the courts step in.
This injunction fits a wider trend of judicial resistance to Trump administration actions. Federal courts have repeatedly been the venue of choice for opponents of the president's agenda, and some of those challenges have ultimately failed on appeal. Whether the Interior Department's appeal succeeds here will depend on how higher courts view the balance between executive authority over government speech and the First Amendment concerns Kelley invoked.
Meanwhile, the administration has not limited its cleanup to park exhibits. Burgum's Interior Department has moved to cut planned funding for DEI programs and support services for migrants, and has fired employees whose conduct conflicted with the department's mission. Fox News Digital noted the case of Shannon "SJ" Joslin, a park ranger who was part of a group that unfurled a trans pride flag at Yosemite last summer.
These moves have drawn fierce opposition from the left, including explosive reactions to mass firings across multiple agencies. But Burgum's argument is straightforward: the American people voted for this. The prior administration embedded its ideological preferences into every corner of the federal bureaucracy, and the current administration is unwinding them.
The Interior Department must now decide how aggressively to pursue its appeal. The weekly reporting requirement alone is an unusual degree of judicial supervision over an executive agency's internal operations. If the injunction stands, it effectively freezes the administration's ability to manage the content of its own exhibits for the duration of the litigation.
The plaintiffs, whoever they are, have won the first round. But preliminary injunctions are not final judgments. The legal question of whether a president can direct changes to government-curated exhibits at federal sites is far from settled. Higher courts may take a very different view of executive authority over government speech than Judge Kelley did.
For now, the administration has signaled it will not back down. And the fight over what national parks teach Americans about their own history is just getting started.
When the government decides what goes on a government sign at a government park, that used to be called management. Now, apparently, it requires a permission slip from a district judge in Massachusetts.
