The battle over the slavery exhibit at the President’s House site in Philadelphia took another turn on Thursday as a federal appeals court sided with the Trump administration’s decision to remove it. The latest court order reversed a February injunction by a Philadelphia district court judge that required the National Park Service to restore the display.
The President’s House display in Philadelphia was the residence where George Washington lived as president, when Philadelphia was the capital of the early United States. The slavery exhibit known as “President’s House: Freedom and Slavery in the Making of a New Nation” commemorates the lives of the slaves of Washington who lived there at the time. It was constructed in 2010. As part of President Donald Trump’s Executive Order 14253, “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History,” the display’s panels were removed on Jan. 22, 2026, because it was considered material that “inappropriately disparaged Americans past or living.”
The city of Philadelphia filed a lawsuit to prevent the removal of the display and, in February, U.S. District Judge Cynthia M. Rufe ordered the National Park Service to “restore the President’s House Site to its physical status as of January 21, 2026.”
“As if the Ministry of Truth in George Orwell’s 1984 now existed … 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,” wrote Rufe in January. “It does not.”
However, it does, according to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit.
The court threw out Ruffe’s injunction, the Philadelphia Inquirer reported. The court ruled that the Trump administration can replace the existing panels with newer versions it approved. The city of Philadelphia does not “have the right to dictate the content of the panels.”
Moreover, the court ruled that the new panels approved by the Trump administration “are full of historical context”. It suitably highlights “the momentous events that took place in the President’s House and other sites at Independence National Historical Park.” The decision of the three-judge panel of the Third Circuit court, comprised of appointments by Presidents George W. Bush, Barack Obama, and Donald Trump, was unanimous.
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Judge Thomas M. Hardiman opined that the replacement panels approved by the Trump administration recognized “the evil of slavery, including its injustices and hypocrisies, and, by telling the story of the nine slaves that Washington kept in the President’s House, remind us of their essential humanity.”
Philadelphia Mayor Cherelle Parker objected to the court’s decision and vowed to continue the fight to restore the original panels.
“I will pursue every legal action possible to reverse this decision,” Parker said in a post on X. “We cannot and WILL not rest until the full story of American history – including the existence of Slavery at the President’s House here in Philadelphia – is told, for our Nation and the World to see.
“I will continue this fight, along with the allies who have been involved with the President’s House from the beginning, including the Avenging The Ancestors Coalition, led by Michael Coard, The Black Journey, and other citizens who feel passionately that there is only one way to tell American history … to tell the truth.”