SEATTLE — After months of backlash, the U.S. Office of Management and Budget has withdrawn approval for the sale of the National Archives building in Seattle.
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In a move that came as a surprise to many, the Trump administration decided last year to sell the property and disperse the collection to Kansas City, Missouri, and Riverside, California.
The Seattle branch maintains and provides access to permanent records created by federal agencies and courts in Washington as well as Alaska, Oregon and Idaho.
Since the announcement that the facility would be closed and its contents moved thousands of miles away, state Attorney General Bob Ferguson, along with dozens of local tribes and preservation societies, pushed back with a series of lawsuits to keep it from happening.
Sen. Maria Cantwell, D-Wash., and Sen. Lisa Murkowski, R-Alaska, along with a group of colleagues, sent a letter to the OMG requesting the facility stay open.
Murray also introduced a bill to prevent the sale without tribal consultation.
The facility contains millions of undigitized historical documents, some of which are particularly important to local tribes, which rely on documents stored there to trace ancestral connections and determine tribal rights.
There are many records essential to Washington there, including files on the interment of Japanese Americans.
“Many people who fought for reparations for Japanese-Americans consulted archives because, again, like the old Chinese and the Filipinos-Chinese American, especially prior to 1950, also have the records here,” Connie So of OCA Asian Pacific Advocates told KIRO 7 in January.
Beyond the historical importance, many of those documents are used to trace family lineage.
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