PHILADELPHIA — President Donald Trump’s administration now has a hard deadline to restore slavery exhibits to the President’s House.
The Department of Interior and National Park Service must restore the President’s House to its condition before the exhibits were removed by 5 p.m. Friday, according to a new order from District Judge Cynthia M. Rufe. In a blistering 40-page opinion Monday, the judge had ordered the exhibits to be restored “immediately,” but without a specific timeframe.
Rufe wrote that the deadline follows the agencies’ “failure to comply” with the injunction’s instruction to take action “forthwith,” which is often defined in law to mean as soon as possible or within 24 hours.
While the federal government appealed the injunction to the Third Circuit Court of Appeals, the judge noted, the Trump administration did not ask for a stay.
“Absent a stay granted by this Court or the Third Circuit, this Court must enforce its own order,” Rufe wrote.
The U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania did not respond to a request for comment. The city declined to comment.
The National Park Service last month removed exhibits telling the story of the nine enslaved Africans who lived in George Washington’s Philadelphia home. The city sued the federal government in turn, and following a tense hearing and the judge’s inspection of the exhibits and site, secured an injunction on Monday that required the federal agencies to restore the interpretive panels.
National Park Service staff were at the President’s House site on Wednesday morning to hose down the walls, which are covered with protest signs in lieu of the exhibits, and place barricades around them.
The National Park Service did not respond to questions about the activity.
A spokesperson for the White House, Taylor Rogers, said in a statement Wednesday that the lawsuit brought by Philadelphia was “premature” because the removal of the exhibits from the President’s House and other national parks is not final.
“The Department of the Interior is engaged in an ongoing review of our nation’s American history exhibits in accordance with the President’s executive order to eliminate corrosive ideology, restore sanity, and reinstate the truth,” Rogers said.
