On June 11, U.S. President Donald Trump signed an executive proclamation to open additional commercial fishing grounds in remote areas of the Pacific. The proclamation says restoring access to these areas “will promote economic opportunity.” However, local groups warn it will open the door to overfishing in a crucial marine habitat and sacred cultural site.
The proclamation, “Restoring American Commercial Fishing in the Pacific,” comes a year after a similar proclamation in April 2025 that opened up commercial fishing in the Pacific Islands Heritage Marine National Monument (PIH). Formerly the Pacific Remote Islands Marine National Monument, the PIH covers nearly 1.3 million square kilometers (500,000 square miles) of Pacific Ocean.
The June 2026 proclamation includes portions of three additional marine national monuments — Rose Atoll, Mariana Trench, and Papahānaumokuākea — which together include nearly 1.8 million km2 (690,000 mi2) of coral atolls, deep-sea trenches and remote islands.
The new proclamation would roll back protections for roughly 1.3 million km2 (500,000 mi2) of the area to allow industrial fishing. Such commercial fishing could include kilometers of baited hooks, known as long lines, and purse seine nets more than 2,000 meters (6,600 feet) long. Both types of fishing gear are highly effective at catching tuna, the target species, as well as other marine life as bycatch.
Conservationists say opening the Pacific monuments to industrial fishing is a significant concern for many species in the area, including threatened sea turtles, whales, dolphins, seabirds, sharks and fish; many are endemic, found nowhere else on Earth.
All the monuments in question were established by previous U.S. presidents under the Antiquities Act, which allows presidents to establish protected areas without congressional approval. Trump is the first president to claim authority under the 1906 act to remove such protection.
The constitutionality of this move is currently being challenged by the environmental law nonprofit Earthjustice.
“The Antiquities Act is a one-way ratchet,” Earthjustice lawyer David Henkin told Mongabay by email. “It authorizes Presidents to create national monuments and to protect their resources. It does not authorize Presidents to strip protections from monuments. This specific legal issue has not yet been resolved by the courts.”
Most of the monument areas are extremely remote and uninhabited. However, part of Papahānaumokuākea is a UNESCO World Heritage Site and “a sacred place for Native Hawaiians,” Kekuewa Kikiloi, co-chair of the Papahānaumokuākea Native Hawaiian Cultural Working Group, said in a statement.
Native Hawaiian belief holds that Papahānaumokuākea is a point from which “all life springs, and to which spirits return to after death.”
“President Trump’s most recent proclamation undermines two decades of public and stakeholder effort to protect this special region of Hawai’i. We’re committed to holding the line and fighting this in court,” Kikiloi said.
Banner image: A shark swims past fish on a coral reef in Papahānaumokuākea Marine National Monument. Image by Andrew Gray/NOAA via Flickr (CC BY-NC 2.0).
Credits
This story first appeared on Mongabay
This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
You may republish this article, so long as you credit the authors and Mongabay, and do not change the text. Please include a link back to the original article.
