Commercial fishing in a vast Pacific nature area is halted after a judge
blocks a Trump order
[August 11, 2025] By
JENNIFER SINCO KELLEHER and AUDREY McAVOY
HONOLULU (AP) — Commercial fishing that recently resumed in a vast
protected area of the Pacific Ocean must halt once again, after a judge
in Hawaii sided this week with environmentalists challenging a Trump
administration rollback of federal ocean protections.
The remote Pacific Islands Heritage Marine National Monument is home to
turtles, marine mammals and seabirds, which environmental groups say
will get snagged by longline fishing, an industrial method involving
baited hooks from lines 60 miles (about 100 kilometers) or longer.
President Donald Trump's executive order to allow this and other types
of commercial fishing in part of the monument changed regulations
without providing a process for public comment and rulemaking and
stripped core protections from the monument, the groups argued in a
lawsuit.
U.S. District Judge Micah W. J. Smith granted a motion by the
environmentalists on Friday. The ruling means boats catching fish for
sale will need to immediately cease fishing in waters between 50 and 200
nautical miles (93 kilometers to 370 kilometers) around Johnston Atoll,
Jarvis Island and Wake Island, said Earthjustice, an environmental law
organization representing the plaintiffs.
U.S. Justice Department attorneys representing the government did not
immediately return an email message seeking comment on Saturday.
Trump has said the U.S. should be “the world’s dominant seafood leader,”
and on the same day of his April executive order, he issued another one
seeking to boost commercial fishing by peeling back regulations and
opening up harvesting in previously protected areas.
President George W. Bush created the marine monument in 2009. It
consists of about 500,000 square miles (1.3 million square kilometers)
in the remote central Pacific Ocean southwest of Hawaii. President
Barack Obama expanded it in 2014.
Soon after Trump's executive order, the National Marine Fisheries
Service sent a letter to fishing permit holders giving them the green
light to fish commercially in the monument's boundaries, Earthjustice's
lawsuit says. Fishing resumed within days, the group said.
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President Donald Trump participates in a trilateral signing ceremony
with Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan and Azerbaijan
President Ilham Aliyev in the State Dining Room of the White House,
Friday, Aug. 8, 2025, in Washington. (AP Photo/Mark Schiefelbein)
 Government attorneys say the
fisheries service’s letter merely notified commercial fishers of a
change that had already taken place through Trump’s authority to
remove the prohibition on commercial fishing in certain areas.
Earthjustice challenged that letter, and by granting the motion in
their favor, the federal judge found the government had chosen not
to defend its letter on the merits and forfeited that argument.
Smith also ruled against the government's other defenses, that the
plaintiffs lacked standing to challenge the letter and that the
court lacked jurisdiction over the matter.
David Henkin, an Earthjustice attorney, said Smith's ruling requires
the government to go through a process to determine what kind of
fishing, and under what conditions, can happen in monument waters in
a way that wouldn't destroy the area.
Members of Hawaii’s longline fishing industry say they have made
numerous gear adjustments and changes over the years, such as circle
hooks, to avoid that.
The lawsuit says allowing commercial fishing in the monument
expansion would also harm the “cultural, spiritual, religious,
subsistence, educational, recreational, and aesthetic interests” of
a group of Native Hawaiian plaintiffs who are connected
genealogically to the Indigenous peoples of the Pacific.
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