Trump Administration Reignites Proposal to Launch Commercial Fishing in Pacific Marine Monument

The Trump administration has proposed a new rule to open the Pacific Islands Heritage Marine National Monument to commercial fishing in the Federal Register today. This would allow the same purse seine fishing, a large wall of netting that encircles an entire school of fish, and longline fishing that is currently permitted outside of the monument. The National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS) proposed rule will be open for a 30-day comment period.

Last year, Kāpa‘a, Conservation Council for Hawai‘i, and the Center for Biological Diversity, represented by Earthjustice, won a lawsuit that halted commercial fishing within the monument’s boundaries. Plaintiffs challenged the NMFS’s failure to follow the lawful process to change the monument’s commercial fishing regulations. This new proposal ignores the unrebutted scientific opinion from last year’s litigation that commercial fishing would harm the monument’s ecosystems and species.

“The Fisheries Service has once again ignored the guidance and perspectives of the native people who belong to the islands and to the ocean that surrounds us. Rather than look for a compromise, it has proposed an all-or-nothing approach to opening commercial fishing in our protected waters. We will go back to court to ensure that the generations of our children’s children who are yet to be born will know the fish and seabirds who call the Pacific home,” said Solomon Pili Kaho’ohalahala, Founding Member of Kāpaʻa.

“We are disappointed by the Fisheries Service’s latest attempt to gut fishing protections in our marine national monument. There is extraordinary stress on the Pacific’s ecosystems from climate change, and species like tuna are already overfished. The Trump administration is taking the least scientific approach possible to pander to the commercial fishing industry,” said Jonee Peters, Executive Director of Conservation Council for Hawaiʻi.

“Trump is putting more than 300,000 square nautical miles of protected Pacific waters on the chopping block just so commercial fishing fleets can save a fraction of their operating costs,” said Maxx Phillips, Hawaiʻi and Pacific Islands director and senior attorney at the Center for Biological Diversity. “These waters are not expendable fishing grounds. They are some of the Pacific’s most important habitats for threatened and endangered wildlife and the Trump administration has no license to trade away their protection. We will keep fighting to ensure these protections remain in place for generations to come.”

Despite its proposal, the NMFS does not expect the fisheries to catch any more fish. The agency states that this change will offer, at most, “minor, beneficial impact” in the form of reduced “transit times and overall fuel and operational costs.” However, the cost to the monument’s healthy ecosystems would be much higher.

Allowing commercial fishing would cause direct effects on many declining or imperiled species that have found sanctuary within the monument, including sea turtles and sharks, that will be killed as bycatch. Abandoned fishing gear and vessel pollution will strain the broader ecosystems, and the indirect effects of harvesting targeted fish (like tunas) can harm seabirds that rely on these species for sustenance.

“This proposal to open a marine national monument to commercial fishing will harm ecosystems and kill imperiled marine mammals, sharks and sea turtles – even as agency officials admit it won’t help the fishing industry catch more fish,” said Earthjustice attorney David Henkin. “This ill-conceived and illegal proposal shows that the Fisheries Service is all too willing to gloss over science and ignore the law to pander to the whims of a president whose failed policies are already causing environmental destruction. We prevailed in court the last time this happened, and we’ll head back to court again to defend the pristine waters of the Pacific Islands Heritage Marine National Monument.”

The groups plan to return to court to challenge the National Marine Fisheries Service’s failure to consider alternatives to reduce environmental harms of opening the Pacific Islands Heritage Marine National Monument to commercial fishing.