The AHA has joined the Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington and the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations in a lawsuit against the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) and US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) challenging NARA’s approval of ICE’s records disposition, which authorizes ICE to destroy several categories of records documenting mistreatment of immigrants detained in ICE custody.

The American Historical Association considers the records delineated in this suit an important part of the public record that must be available to future generations of historians. We know from historical work on comparable issues in the past that this genre of government documents is often essential to understanding the full story of our nation’s past.