By Nate Raymond
BOSTON, Feb 17 (Reuters) – Groups representing park conservationists, historians and scientists filed a lawsuit on Tuesday seeking to prevent President Donald Trump’s administration from scrubbing information from parks and monuments, after exhibits and signs touching on topics like slavery and climate change were removed.
The National Parks Conservation Association, American Association for State and Local History and four other groups argue in a lawsuit filed in Boston federal court that the U.S. Department of the Interior is engaged in a “sustained campaign to erase history and undermine science.”
The lawsuit argues the department is removing signs and exhibits from parks in violation of mandates from Congress governing how more than 430 national park sites should be operated and has adopted an unlawful policy that lacks any reasoned explanation for why various signs and exhibits must be removed.
“Censoring science and erasing America’s history at national parks are direct threats to everything these amazing places, and our country, stand for,” Alan Spears, senior director of cultural resources at the National Parks Conservation Association, said in a statement.
The Interior Department did not respond to a request for comment.
The case was one of two filed on Tuesday challenging changes the department had implemented at national monuments and parks under its jurisdiction as part of Trump’s broader agenda.
Several community organizations filed a lawsuit in New York arguing the department had unlawfully removed the Pride flag at the Stonewall National Monument, the first national monument dedicated to the LGBTQ rights movement.
The case in Boston was filed a day after a federal judge in Pennsylvania ordered the National Park Service to reinstall an exhibit that was removed from the President’s House Site at the Independence National Historical Park in Philadelphia that described the history of slavery and the ownership of enslaved people by President George Washington, the nation’s first president.
Tuesday’s lawsuit said that exhibit was one of several removed after Trump signed an executive order in March 2025 targeting what he called a “revisionist movement” that portrayed the U.S. as “inherently racist, sexist, oppressive, or otherwise irredeemably flawed.”
Trump’s order directed the Interior Department to restore parks, monuments and memorials that had been removed or changed to perpetuate what the White House called a “false revision of history.”
The lawsuit said that following a subsequent order from Interior Secretary Doug Burgum implementing Trump’s directive, the National Park Service had identified hundreds of signs and materials that it has begun removing from parks nationwide.
Among them are signs that were posted in Maine’s Acadia National Park that described the impact of climate change on the park and the significance of Cadillac Mountain to the Wabanaki people who are indigenous to the region.
(Reporting by Nate Raymond in Boston; Editing by David Gregorio)
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