Judge orders administration to restore slavery exhibit at President's House Site

In a decision citing George Orwell's dystopian novel "1984," a federal judge on Monday prohibited the Trump administration from removing an exhibit related to slavery in a section of Philadelphia's Independence National Historical Park.

U.S. District Judge Cynthia Rufe issued a preliminary injunctionordering the Trump administration to restore the President's House Site -- an outdoor exhibit opened in 2010 where a house George Washington occupied once stood -- to its original statebefore the National Park Service removed 34 educational panels and video presentations that referenced the nine people enslaved by Washington who lived and worked there.

The removal of the slavery exhibit was done to comply with President Donald Trump's March 27, 2025, executive order, "Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History," which directed the Interior Department to remove "divisive, race-centered ideology" and narratives from federal cultural institutions, a Department of the Interior spokesperson told ABC News in a statement last month.

Judge Rufe, ruling on a lawsuit brought by the city of Philadelphia seeking to have the exhibit restored, wrote that "The government here likewise asserts truth is no longer self-evident, but rather the property of the elected chief magistrate and his appointees and delegees, at his whim to be scraped clean, hidden, or overwritten. And why? Solely because, as Defendants state, it has the power."

"An agency, whether the Department of the Interior, NPS, or any other agency, cannot arbitrarily decide what is true, based on its own whims or the whims of the new leadership, regardless of the evidence before it," the judge wrote in an opinion issued on President's Day.

Rufe, appointed to the bench by George W. Bush, concluded that the changes to the exhibit were arbitrary and that the National Park Service should have consulted with the city before amending the exhibit.

"The removal of the slavery displays, therefore undermines the City's statutory and long-running interests in the completion of Independence National Historical Park and the President's House," the judge wrote.

At multiple points in her opinion, Judge Rufe rebuked the Trump administration's argument that "it alone has the power to erase, alter, remove and hide historical accounts" by comparing their actions to those of Big Brother in Orwell's 1984.

"As if the Ministry of Truth in George Orwell's 1984 now existed, with its motto 'Ignorance is Strength,' this Court is now asked to determine whether the federal government has the power it claims -- to dissemble and disassemble historical truths when it has some domain over historical facts. It does not," she wrote.