Trump Signs Proclamation Opening Nearly Half a Million Square Miles of Pacific Ocean to Commercial Fishing
President Donald Trump signed an executive proclamation on June 11, 2026, delivering what his administration is calling the most sweeping expansion of American commercial fishing rights in the Pacific Ocean in decades. The action, formally titled "Executive Proclamation Restoring American Commercial Fishing in the Pacific," opens additional prized fishing grounds to hard-working American fishermen and United States-flagged fishing vessels. For a domestic fishing industry that has spent years watching foreign fleets harvest waters once accessible to American boats, the signing represents a long-sought turning of the tide — and a flashpoint in the ongoing national debate over how to balance economic productivity against marine conservation.
What the Proclamation Actually Does
The proclamation restores commercial fishing access to the Mau and Ho'omalu Zones of the Papahānaumokuākea Marine National Monument, the Islands Unit of the Mariana Trench Marine National Monument, and the Rose Atoll Marine National Monument. In simple geographic terms, that is an enormous stretch of the Pacific. The proclamation opens fishing access to parts of the Papahānaumokuākea Marine National Monument near Hawai'i, the Rose Atoll Marine National Monument near American Samoa, and the Islands Unit of the Mariana Trench Marine National Monument, which encompasses the waters around the Northern Mariana Islands chain — together covering nearly half a million square miles of the Pacific Ocean.
Trump left no ambiguity about his intent at the signing ceremony. "It's my honor to be taking this action to lower seafood costs and generate millions and millions of dollars in new business for our great fishermen by restoring commercial access to three areas of the western Pacific Ocean," Trump said as he signed the proclamation. He also characterized the prior restrictions as fundamentally unfair, pointing to foreign competition that faced no such limitations. Trump said federal laws already provide comprehensive management and conservation protections for marine ecosystems and species. "Hundreds of thousands of square miles of ocean were cut off for them. They can't fish," he said during the signing. "Other people could fish. They couldn't. These people weren't allowed to fish."
The Full Scope of the America First Fishing Policy
Thursday's proclamation did not emerge from a vacuum. It is the third and most expansive chapter in a campaign the administration has been prosecuting since the earliest weeks of Trump's second term. The action follows a series of moves by the Trump administration to expand commercial fishing access across U.S. waters, including opening the Pacific Remote Islands Marine National Monument in April 2025 and the Northeast Canyons and Seamounts Marine National Monument in the Atlantic in February 2026. With the latest proclamation now signed, Trump has removed commercial fishing restrictions from all five U.S. marine national monuments.
In April 2025, he signed an executive order focused on reducing regulations, countering unfair foreign trade practices, increasing seafood exports, and creating an America First Seafood Strategy. That broader architecture gave NOAA the mandate it needed to move quickly. Through the strategic use of the Magnuson-Stevens Act and executive action, NOAA has successfully deregulated fishing operations, reversed decades-old closures, and maximized harvest quotas — expediting the openings of fisheries and increasing catch limits based on the best available science, delivering financial returns to coastal communities.
NOAA continues to aggressively slash red tape and replace outdated, micromanaged restrictions with adaptive, flexible standards — maximizing profitability for the domestic fleet and keeping fisheries open. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick made clear that the administration views this as a defining economic achievement. "President Trump is once again delivering for American fishermen by opening prized Pacific fishing grounds with this Executive Proclamation," Lutnick said.
How These Monuments Were Created — and Why That Matters
A Legacy of Both Parties
The monuments being rolled back are not the product of a single administration's overreach, as Trump's critics are quick to point out — and as some of his own allies are careful to note. They were designated as marine national monuments by former President George W. Bush, and former President Obama later expanded the Papahānaumokuākea monument. The Pacific Remote Islands Marine National Monument itself has a bipartisan lineage. The protected area was first established by President George W. Bush in 2009 and later expanded by President Barack Obama in 2014, creating one of the world's largest marine protected areas and largely prohibiting commercial fishing across hundreds of thousands of square miles of ocean.
All of these protections rest on a century-old legal foundation. Marine national monuments are designated under the Antiquities Act of 1906, a law that has been used by 18 presidents — nine Democrat, nine Republican — to protect more than 160 national monuments. That bipartisan history is precisely why legal challenges to Trump's rollbacks have gained traction in federal courts, and why this latest proclamation is almost certain to face litigation.
What These Waters Contain
The ecological importance of these zones is difficult to overstate. The restrictions were designed to protect the space, home to coral reefs, endangered species like the coconut crab and hawksbill turtle, and migratory fish populations such as the bumphead parrotfish. The monuments around the Mariana Trench alone encompass some of the deepest and least-disturbed ocean habitats on the planet. NOAA itself has historically described these areas in terms of their scientific irreplaceability, emphasizing that some of the life cycles supported within them occur nowhere else under U.S. jurisdiction.
Marine national monuments and marine sanctuaries protect over 1 million square miles of ocean ecosystems, preserve cultural resources, and provide opportunities for recreation and tourism. The question — fiercely contested between the administration and conservation groups — is whether commercial fishing, when managed under existing law, poses a genuine threat to those resources or whether the monument designations were always excessive restrictions dressed up as conservation.
The Administration's Economic Argument
The White House and NOAA have consistently argued that the monument system, as previously constituted, created a regulatory asymmetry that punished American fishermen without producing meaningful conservation gains. NOAA said previous prohibitions on commercial fishing in the Pacific Ocean forced American commercial fishermen further offshore into international waters where they had to compete against "poorly regulated foreign fishing fleets." From that perspective, the monument boundaries were not protecting fish — they were simply redirecting the catch to non-American vessels operating under weaker standards.
The White House argued that banning commercial fishing in these waters was never necessary to protect them, pointing to existing federal law, including the Magnuson-Stevens Fishery Conservation and Management Act, as sufficient protection for migratory fish species found there. This is a position with genuine scientific debate behind it. Trump's proclamation echoes a common industry argument — that the prior ban from his predecessors did little to stop overfishing since tuna and numerous other fish species are migratory. Tuna, for instance, do not stay put within monument boundaries; they range across millions of square miles of open ocean, making their management inherently a question of international treaty and federal quota rather than monument status.
The President's Executive Proclamation came as a direct result of feedback from the U.S. fishing industry, and industry voices were present and prominent at the signing. Among those celebrating the proclamation was Pacific Seafood CEO Frank Dulcich, who spoke during Thursday's signing ceremony at the White House. Pacific Seafood, founded in Portland, Oregon, has grown into one of the largest vertically integrated seafood companies in North America, and its presence at the signing underscored how much corporate infrastructure is now aligned with the administration's fishing agenda.
Trump said at the event, "We're officially reopening nearly half a million square miles — wow — of water around [the] northwestern Hawaiian Islands, Northern Mariana Islands and American Samoa," adding that the move would also lower seafood costs. He said his administration's actions to reduce restrictions on the fishing industry "have unlocked billions of dollars in economic value and protected thousands and thousands of jobs from great people that voted for Trump."
Conservation Groups Sound the Alarm
Scientists and Advocacy Organizations Push Back Hard
Environmental groups have been vocal, organized, and, in at least one case, successful in court. In October 2025, 53 organisations, 234 scientists and more than 16,000 individuals submitted public comments urging the administration to maintain strong protections for marine national monuments. That public pressure campaign did not slow the administration down, but it laid the groundwork for legal challenges now working their way through federal courts.
The scientific objection centers on a well-established body of research about how marine protected areas function. Experts say that the industry's dismissal of monument protections reflects a misunderstanding of what marine protected areas actually do. "MPAs act as safe havens for marine life," notes NOAA itself. These areas provide crucial spaces to support the life cycles of numerous marine species, creating healthy, resilient ocean ecosystems. The argument that migratory fish cannot be protected by fixed boundaries misses the point, scientists say — monuments protect spawning grounds, juvenile habitats, and prey species that migratory fish depend on even when those fish themselves range widely.
Arlo Hemphill, Greenpeace USA project lead on ocean sanctuaries, said: "Opening the Pacific Islands Heritage Marine National Monument to commercial fishing puts one of the most pristine ocean ecosystems on the planet at risk." He added that almost 90 percent of global marine fish stocks are fully exploited or overfished. That global context matters. When nearly nine in ten fish stocks worldwide are at or beyond their biological limits, opening the remaining reserves to commercial harvest invites the question of what exactly is being held back for.
Critics of the administration's approach argue that opening these areas to industrial fishing undermines the legal and ecological foundation of the monument system, and that more effective support for U.S. fishers would come through strengthening enforcement against illegal fishing, improving stock assessments and investing in climate-adaptive fisheries management — not by dismantling protections for the ocean's most sensitive places.
Cultural Stakes in the Pacific Islands
For indigenous communities in the Pacific, the proclamation carries a dimension that gets lost in the Washington policy debate. One regional leader said, "As a native of the Marianas, this action feels like a direct attack on cultural heritage and the fragile ecosystems of a treasured resource that was previously reserved for the CHamoru and Refaluwasch people." In practical terms, the proclamation would open waters that local fishermen already had access to under the monument, but now with outside competition. In other words, the proclamation does not simply open new territory for American fishermen in the aggregate — it introduces large-scale commercial competition into waters that small-scale indigenous fishermen have relied upon for generations.
The Courts: Where the Real Battle Is Being Fought
The legal front has been as active as the executive one. Earthjustice won a ruling in August 2025 that halted commercial fishing in the Pacific Islands Heritage Marine National Monument, when it sued on behalf of Kāpaʻa, the Conservation Council for Hawai'i and the Center for Biological Diversity. A judge in that case found that the Trump administration had violated the Administrative Procedure Act by forgoing public comments or hearings. That ruling revealed a procedural vulnerability in the administration's strategy: moving so fast that the standard notice-and-comment requirements of federal rulemaking were bypassed.
A federal court has since ruled that commercial fishing cannot legally continue in the Pacific Islands Heritage monument, and a separate legal challenge — arguing that the president has no authority to abolish or diminish national monuments established by a prior president — is currently underway. That second challenge cuts to the constitutional heart of the entire campaign. If courts ultimately decide that presidents cannot unilaterally shrink or open monuments created by predecessors, the entire architecture of the America First Fishing Policy in these waters could unravel, regardless of how many proclamations are signed in the Oval Office.
Environmental groups reacted to the June 11 proclamation with immediate pledges of further legal action. "Commercial fishing in our protected marine monuments would not only be disastrous for the environment, but also does nothing for the fishing industry," said Earthjustice's Henkin in a statement. The same organization that successfully halted fishing in the Pacific Islands Heritage Monument is now squarely focused on the latest round of opened waters.
A Pattern of Escalation: From One Monument to Five
Stepping back from the details of any single proclamation, what emerges is a systematic campaign to dismantle the entire U.S. marine monument system as it applies to commercial fishing. The progression has been methodical. President Trump began rolling back marine monument protections in April 2025 with an executive order calling for review of existing marine monuments and a proclamation opening the Pacific Islands Heritage Marine Monument to commercial fishing. On February 6, 2026, President Trump signed a proclamation opening the Northeast Canyons and Seamounts Marine National Monument to commercial fishing. The June 2026 proclamation targeting Papahānaumokuākea, the Mariana Trench, and Rose Atoll completes the set.
The geographic sweep is staggering. The Trump administration struck down prohibitions on commercial fishing across more than 500,000 square miles of marine national monuments in the Pacific Ocean with Thursday's single action alone — and when added to the earlier Pacific Remote Islands proclamation, the total acreage unlocked for commercial harvest runs well past the land area of the contiguous United States. This is not a trimming of regulations at the margins; it is a wholesale redefinition of what the U.S. marine monument system is for.
What It Means for the American Seafood Industry
For commercial fishermen — particularly those operating tuna long-liners, swordfish boats, and deep-water vessel operations out of Hawaii, American Samoa, and the Pacific Northwest — the proclamations represent genuine relief from what many described as an unworkable regulatory environment. The White House said the changes reopen "nearly half a million square miles" of Pacific waters to federally managed commercial fishing, and the policy has been welcomed by fishing industry groups, Pacific officials, and Trump administration leaders who say reopening the waters will boost domestic seafood production, support coastal economies and help U.S. fleets compete with foreign fishing operations.
This executive action opens more economic opportunities for commercial fishermen and continues to strengthen the economic security of coastal communities. NOAA is proud to support the Administration's pledge to restore U.S. seafood competitiveness through the America First Fishing Policy. The administration has also framed this as a food security issue, arguing that higher domestic production translates directly into lower prices at the seafood counter — a message with particular resonance at a time when grocery bills remain a political flashpoint across the country.
"Restoring commercial fishing access to these vital areas reflects the continued commitment of this Administration to American fisheries, which are built on the foundation of rigorous science, robust monitoring, strong enforcement, and the daily commitment of our dedicated fishermen," NOAA Administrator Neil Jacobs said in a statement. The administration's bet is that the Magnuson-Stevens Act — the cornerstone of federal fisheries management since 1976 — provides adequate guardrails without the need for monument-level exclusions.
The Larger Debate: Conservation vs. Access
The fight over Pacific marine monuments is, in miniature, a rehearsal of a much larger argument about how the United States manages its natural resources in the 21st century. On one side sits an administration that views conservation designations accumulated over two decades as regulatory excess that imposes real economic costs on working Americans while delivering diffuse and sometimes speculative ecological benefits. On the other side stands a scientific community and a legal infrastructure that has spent those same two decades building the case that protecting ocean ecosystems at scale is not optional — that once these habitats are altered by industrial harvest, the ecological clock cannot simply be rewound.
Conservationists are worried this move will erase years of biodiversity progress in the zone, and fear it is a stark example of commercial interests being prioritized over environmental stewardship. Whether or not that characterization is fair, the tension it describes is real: every pound of fish harvested from a formerly protected area is simultaneously an economic gain for an American fisherman and a draw-down from a reserve that was, at least in principle, being held back for ecosystem resilience.
The legal battles now unfolding will likely determine whether this transformation of the U.S. marine monument system stands or is reversed — potentially multiple times as administrations change. What is already clear is that the ocean has become one of the most consequential policy battlegrounds of the Trump presidency, and that the stakes, measured in square miles of habitat and millions of dollars in commercial catch, are substantial for both sides.
