A court-ordered inventory has revealed that the National Park Service quietly pulled at least 51 exhibits from 38 locations across the country as part of President Donald Trump’s executive order aimed at eliminating displays that “inappropriately disparage Americans past or living.”
The list was submitted by the Trump administration in a court filing on Wednesday, shedding light on the scope of the removals. Among the affected sites is Philadelphia’s Independence National Historical Park, where an exhibit detailing George Washington’s ownership of enslaved people was taken down.
The filing came at the direction of Boston-based U.S. District Judge Angel Kelley, who ruled Friday that the federal government was engaged in an illegal effort to “rewrite the nation’s history with a white-out pen.” Her ruling followed a legal challenge brought by groups representing national park conservationists, historians, and scientists, who argued the administration had broken laws governing how the National Park Service operates.
In a separate filing, the administration described the judge’s order to have the exhibits reinstalled by July 3 — the day before the country marks the 250th anniversary of its founding — as a “herculean and unmanageable task.” Officials asked that the order be put on hold while they appeal the decision, which blocked Interior Secretary Doug Burgum from carrying out Trump’s March 2025 directive.
Trump’s order took aim at what he described as a “revisionist movement” that portrayed the United States as “inherently racist, sexist, oppressive or otherwise irredeemably flawed,” and instructed the Interior Department to make changes at national parks across the nation. Critics have charged that Trump is attempting to erase parts of American history to support false narratives about the country.
The inventory filed with the court also listed Fort Sumter in South Carolina, the Jamaica Bay Wildlife Refuge at the Gateway National Recreation Area in New York, and Acadia National Park in Maine as sites where materials were removed. At each of those three parks, exhibits related to climate change were taken down. According to the court ruling, those items were discarded because officials deemed them unrelated to the “beauty, abundance, and grandeur of the natural landscape.”
A National Park Service official acknowledged in an accompanying court filing that the submitted list was likely incomplete and that not every item flagged for removal had actually been taken down yet.
Judge Kelley, who was appointed by Trump’s Democratic predecessor Joe Biden, noted in her ruling that an internal National Park Service database — leaked by anonymous civil servants in March — had identified more than 500 items under review for potential removal.
The agency also noted that, in the interest of transparency, the filed list included six additional items removed from a 39th national park under a separate Trump executive order. Attorneys representing the plaintiffs had not responded to requests for comment as of the time of reporting.
