This post is part of Challenging Precedent, a blog of the Stanford Center for Racial Justice examining race, law, and regulation in the Trump era.

Following President Trump’s March 27, 2025 executive order titled “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History,” facilities managed by the National Park Service have begun removing signs and displays referencing slavery, killings of Native Americans, and Japanese American internment during World War II.

At Fort Pulaski National Monument in Georgia, the Washington Post reported that Trump administration officials ordered the removal of a reproduction of a famous photograph known as “The Scourged Back” which depicts a formerly enslaved man with scars on his back from whippings. A display at Jamaica Bay Wildlife Refuge in New York City was also taken down; it had referenced “[t]hings we hope never to repeat–like slavery, massacres of Indians or holding Japanese Americans in wartime camps.”  

The March executive order criticized federal sites for presenting a “distorted narrative” that has cast the nation’s “founding principles and milestones in a negative light,” reconstructing “our Nation’s unparalleled legacy of advancing liberty, individual rights, and human happiness…as inherently racist, sexist, oppressive, or otherwise irredeemably flawed.” While the order singled out certain exhibits, including a Smithsonian exhibit on race and American sculpture, the EO ordered a review of all public monuments, memorials, statues, markers, or similar properties within the Department of the Interior’s jurisdiction. In addition to 63 national parks, the National Park Service manages 433 sites across the country.

Through a May 20, 2025 order, the Secretary of the Interior instructed heads of the National Park Service, Bureau of Land Management, and Bureau of Indian Affairs to review all “properties for inappropriate content” and report any information that may be out of compliance with the executive order. The Trump administration has also solicited help from the public, asking national park visitors to report information that is “negative about either past or living Americans.” These signs have appeared at sites such as Manzanar and Minidoka, where Japanese Americans were incarcerated during World War II. 

The review of national park sites’ compliance with the executive order is ongoing. In an August 12, 2025 letter to the Smithsonian, the White House requested extensive materials in order to conduct “comprehensive internal review” of selected Smithsonian museums and exhibitions, including the National Museum of American History, National Museum of African American History and Culture, and the National Air and Space Museum, with additional museums to be “reviewed in Phase II.” It is unclear who will continue to lead this initiative for the administration, as the letter’s principal author, Lindsey Halligan, recently assumed a high-profile role as U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia where she promptly indicted former FBI director James Comey. As the administration’s review continues across hundreds of sites, Save Our Signs, a group launched by librarians, public historians, and data experts, has begun documenting the removal of these displays and collecting photos of displays at national parks to preserve them in a publicly available format. 

Dayle Chung is a Bremond Fellow and a student at Stanford Law School.