A federal judge appointed by former President Joe Biden has ordered the Trump administration to put back exhibits, signs, and displays at national parks across the country that were removed under an Interior Department directive, and to stop pulling down any more while legal challenges play out.
U.S. District Judge Angel Kelley, who sits in Massachusetts and joined the federal bench in 2021, issued the preliminary injunction on Friday. The order requires the administration to restore materials that had been taken down at sites including Philadelphia’s Independence National Historical Park, Fort Sumter in South Carolina, Sunset Crater Volcano National Monument in Arizona, and Lowell National Historical Park in Massachusetts.
The ruling lands squarely in the middle of a growing pattern: federal judges, many appointed by Democratic presidents, stepping in to halt Trump administration policy actions through injunctions that freeze executive authority in place. The Interior Department wasted no time labeling Kelley a “liberal activist judge” and said it would review its appeal options.
The dispute traces back to President Trump’s March 27, 2025, executive order titled “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History.” That order stated that national parks and monuments had been “changed to perpetuate a false reconstruction of American history,” and directed the Interior Department to act to ensure government descriptions and depictions do not “inappropriately disparage Americans past or living.”
The order’s stated goal: to put the “focus on the greatness” of America.
Interior Secretary Doug Burgum followed through with a directive targeting what he called “improper partisan ideology” at museums, monuments, landmarks, and other public exhibits under federal control. Fox News Digital reported that the removals included an exhibit at Independence National Historical Park describing George Washington’s ownership of enslaved people, signage detailing climate threats at Fort Sumter, a sign at Sunset Crater that included an image of a visitor holding a Pride flag, and films about labor history at Lowell National Historical Park.
Trump’s executive order also took aim at museums in the nation’s capital. It read: “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.”
Burgum, speaking to Fox News’ Kayleigh McEnany on “Saturday in America,” framed the effort as a cleanup operation inherited from the prior administration. He described the situation bluntly.
“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.”
Burgum vowed he is “cleaning up the mess that’s been left with us.”
Kelley saw it differently. In her ruling, she wrote that the plaintiffs had shown the administration’s actions were meant “to rewrite the Nation’s history with a white-out pen.” She described the removal of materials referencing slavery, climate change, and other topics as setting a “dangerous precedent of censorship and sanitization.”
Her opinion went further. Kelley wrote that the administration, under the banner of promoting American dignity, was actually pursuing something narrower, sharing only a partial version of history.
“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.”
The injunction requires the administration to restore affected materials, halt further removals, and file weekly status reports detailing its progress in putting exhibits back in place. The case names, specific plaintiffs, and legal claims were not detailed in the reporting.
This is far from the only courtroom confrontation between the Trump administration and judges appointed by his predecessors. In a separate case, a federal judge appointed by President Obama struck down Trump’s $100,000 H-1B visa fee, calling it an unauthorized tax.
An Interior Department spokesperson responded to the ruling on Sunday with a statement to Fox News Digital that mixed defiance with celebration. The spokesperson dismissed the judge’s decision and pivoted to the administration’s plans for the nation’s 250th anniversary.
“The Department will look at our appeal options while we 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.”
The statement also called Kelley a “liberal activist judge”, a characterization that, whatever its political utility, does not change the legal reality that the injunction stands until it is overturned or modified on appeal.
The administration’s willingness to fight in court is consistent across policy areas. Judges have also intervened in immigration enforcement, including one case where a Biden-appointed judge ordered ICE to release an illegal immigrant wanted for murder in the Dominican Republic.
At the core of this fight is a legitimate tension. The executive branch controls the Interior Department and, by extension, what goes on display at federally managed parks and monuments. Every administration makes curatorial choices. Exhibits change. Signage gets updated. Interpretive programs shift with new leadership.
But Kelley’s ruling treats those curatorial choices as potential First Amendment violations, a framework that, if upheld, could limit any president’s ability to shape how federal sites present American history. The judge’s language about “censorship and sanitization” frames the government’s own editorial decisions about its own exhibits as constitutionally suspect.
That framing raises hard questions. If removing a climate change sign at Fort Sumter is censorship, is adding one in the first place also a curatorial choice subject to judicial review? If a sign featuring a Pride flag at a volcano monument must stay, does a future administration’s addition of a religious heritage display enjoy the same judicial protection?
The pattern of federal judges blocking executive action through preliminary injunctions has drawn criticism from both sides of the aisle over the years. In this case, a single district judge in Massachusetts has effectively dictated exhibit policy for national parks from South Carolina to Arizona. Courts have similarly stepped in to block the USDA from enforcing SNAP conditions even as fraud probes revealed billions in waste.
Trump’s executive order referenced the “race riots of 2020” as a catalyst for changes at parks and monuments that he sought to reverse. Whether one views those post-2020 changes as necessary reckoning or ideological overreach depends largely on one’s politics. But the question of whether a federal judge should be the one making that call, rather than the elected officials who run the executive branch, is a structural issue that transcends any single exhibit about slavery or climate.
The administration has also faced judicial resistance on immigration policy, with judges halting moves to end temporary protected status and blocking deportation efforts in separate high-profile cases.
The Interior Department said it is examining appeal options. The weekly status reports Kelley ordered will create a paper trail, and potential contempt leverage, if the administration drags its feet on restoration. Meanwhile, the America 250 celebrations are set to crescendo on July 4, and the administration clearly intends to use that milestone to project its vision of American greatness, court orders or not.
The specific exhibits at issue, a description of Washington’s slaveholding, climate signage at a Civil War fort, a Pride flag image at a volcano monument, labor history films in a mill town, are a revealing cross-section of the culture war playing out in federal spaces. Each removal was a choice. Each restoration order is also a choice, just made by a judge instead of an elected official.
When unelected judges start curating national park exhibits from the bench, the question isn’t really about history anymore. It’s about who governs.
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