The Lines Come Off the Map

On Thursday 11 June, in the Oval Office and flanked by commercial fishermen, President Trump signed a proclamation reopening roughly half a million square miles of the Pacific Ocean to commercial fishing — waters that three of his predecessors had set aside as some of the most protected marine wilderness on Earth. The boats from Canada and Japan worked the nearby seas, he told the assembled fishermen, while American vessels could not. The proclamation lifts the fishing prohibitions inside three marine national monuments: Papahānaumokuākea, near Hawaii; the Islands Unit of the Mariana Trench monument, near Guam; and Rose Atoll, near American Samoa.

I · What was opened

The order does not abolish the monuments; it removes the specific bans on commercial fishing within them. In Papahānaumokuākea it reopens the Mau and Hoʻomalu Zones and the waters beyond fifty nautical miles; in the Mariana Trench monument, the Islands Unit; around Rose Atoll, the band between twelve and fifty nautical miles. To do it, the proclamation modifies the orders that created these places — issued by President George W. Bush in 2006 and 2009 and expanded by President Obama in 2016 — using the same Antiquities Act under which they were established. The Secretary of Commerce is directed to rewrite the regulations to match.

The change had been building for months. In March, the Western Pacific Regional Fishery Management Council — the federal body that manages these waters — voted to restore access under the Magnuson-Stevens Act, with permits, catch limits, observer coverage, logbooks and vessel-monitoring required. Whatever else it is, this is regulated access, not an open frontier.

II · What was protected

These are not ordinary fishing grounds. Papahānaumokuākea — the largest of the three, quadrupled by President Obama in 2016 to some 582,578 square miles — is the only mixed natural-and-cultural UNESCO World Heritage Site in the United States, and among the largest protected areas on the planet: a refuge for endangered Hawaiian monk seals, more than twenty species of seabird, the world's deepest known corals, and waters of profound significance to Native Hawaiians. The Mariana Trench monument guards the deepest place on Earth and a chain of undersea volcanoes; the portion reopened here is its Islands Unit — the reef-fringed waters around three remote volcanic islands in the north. Rose Atoll is American Samoa's most intact reef. Each was set aside precisely because it remained, by the standards of a heavily fished ocean, close to whole.

A monument is a line drawn to hold one place in trust against the day the rest of the sea is emptied.

III · The case for it

The administration's argument is not frivolous, and it deserves to be stated at its strongest. The United States imports most of the seafood it eats; the White House frames the reopening as a matter of seafood competitiveness, food security, jobs and lower prices. There is a fairness grievance with teeth — highly migratory tuna do not respect monument boundaries, and foreign fleets have long worked the open Pacific around these lines while American boats were turned away. The fishery managers insist the change is compatible with conservation. "This is not about removing monument protections," said Kitty Simonds, the Council's executive director; it is about restoring sustainable fishing in limited areas under rules built over decades. The administration adds that the species in question are migratory, not unique to these waters, and already governed by federal catch limits. And there is a concrete loss to point to: the Northwestern Hawaiian Islands once supplied close to half the bottomfish sold in Hawaii before those grounds closed in 2011.

IV · The case against it

The opposition's strongest argument is not sentimental but economic, and it cuts at the rationale directly: US tuna fleets already reach their federal catch limits every year without fishing inside the monuments. If the quota is the binding constraint, reopening the monuments unlocks little genuinely new catch — which is why conservation lawyers describe the move as one that is disastrous for the environment while doing nothing for the industry. The scientific case is the one the monuments were built on: large, fully protected areas act as refuges and nurseries that seed the waters around them, and the value of keeping the most intact places intact rises, not falls, as the rest of the ocean is drawn down.

The managers dispute that protection requires a fishing ban; the scientists who pushed for the monuments dispute that regulated fishing leaves them protected. That disagreement is the real fault line, and it is not new.

V · The legal shadow

What lifts this above an ordinary policy argument is that a version of it has already gone to court — and lost. In April 2025 the President reopened the Pacific Remote Islands Marine National Monument to commercial fishing by the same mechanism. Earthjustice sued on behalf of Hawaiian and conservation groups, and in August 2025 a federal district court struck that reopening down. The same organisation has vowed to challenge this proclamation too.

Beneath the specifics sits an unsettled question. The Antiquities Act plainly lets a president create a monument; whether it lets a later president dismantle the protections of an earlier one has never been squarely resolved. This order may, in other words, be a proclamation that a court has effectively already rejected once.

VI · Who asked for it

The push did not come from a broad public; it came from a small, interlocking set of interests. The most active is the Western Pacific Regional Fishery Management Council — Wespac, the federal body that manages these fisheries — which has lobbied successive administrations to reopen the monuments and whose longtime executive director, Kitty Simonds, stood at the President's side when he reopened the Pacific Remote Islands monument in 2025. Wespac runs on Commerce Department grants and, as a federal grantee, is barred from using federal money to lobby — a line conservation groups and at least one of its own members have accused it of crossing.

The commercial muscle is the Honolulu longline fleet, represented by the Hawaii Longline Association, and the two are not easily separated. Sean Martin, the Association's president, co-owns the vessel firm Vessel Management Associates and POP Fishing & Marine and has himself chaired Wespac; his partner Jim Cook has also long held a Council seat, the pair effectively trading the industry's chair between them, and that seat now belongs to an Association director. One investigation called the connection between council and industry "seamless."

The fleet itself — roughly 140 US-flagged vessels, concentrated among a handful of Honolulu owners including Martin and Cook and the Dang and Nguyen family companies, which together hold dozens of the permits — is American-owned by law but crewed largely by foreign contract workers, an arrangement that drew a forced-labour exposé a decade ago. And in American Samoa, where the Rose Atoll reopening matters most, the stakes narrow to a single cannery: StarKist, the territory's last tuna plant and its largest private employer, owned since 2008 by the South Korean conglomerate Dongwon Industries. The territory's delegate blames the cannery's decline on closed US fishing grounds — which means that part of the case for reopening some of the planet's most protected water is a case for keeping a Korean-owned cannery supplied.

VII · Horizon blindness, on the map

There is a concept this publication keeps returning to: horizon blindness, the habit of mistaking the appearance of plenty for its substance — of assuming that what looks abundant from the deck is abundant in fact. A marine monument is the institutional answer to that blindness: a line drawn on a chart to hold one place in trust against the day the rest of the sea is emptied. What this week shows is how provisional those lines are. Protection, on the water, is only ever an agreement someone made — and an agreement can be unmade with a single signature, in a room far from the sea, surrounded by the people it benefits.

Hold two truths at once, because both are real. The fishermen's grievance is genuine: they watched foreign boats work waters they were barred from, and no one likes being the only one made to stop. And stripping protection from the most intact marine wilderness the United States has left — over the objection of the science, and quite possibly the courts — is the kind of choice that looks one way from the Oval Office and another from the rail. The Emptied Sea's argument was never that the ocean is already lost. It was that the race is undecided, and decided by whether anyone will hold a line when holding it costs something. This week a line came off the map. Whether it stays off will be settled, as these things increasingly are, somewhere else: in a courtroom, on the evidence, and in how loudly the rest of us insist the line was there for a reason.

Sources

The proclamation (primary): The White House, "Restoring American Commercial Fishing in the Pacific," whitehouse.gov, and the accompanying fact sheet; with NOAA's implementing announcement, noaa.gov.

The signing and scope: Associated Press, via The Washington Times; The Hill; Bloomberg.

The management process and the industry case: the Western Pacific Regional Fishery Management Council's March final action and Executive Director Kitty Simonds's framing, via Maui Now; the Northwestern Hawaiian Islands bottomfish history via National Fisherman.

The opposition and the legal precedent: Earthjustice on its pledge to sue and the August 2025 federal court ruling that struck down the Pacific Remote Islands reopening, earthjustice.org.

Who pushed for it, and who owns the fleet: Wespac's lobbying and the federal-grantee restriction via In These Times and Honolulu Civil Beat; the Hawaii Longline Association and the Martin–Cook–Council overlap via Hawaii Business and Environment Hawai'i; the fleet's foreign-crew arrangement via the Honolulu Star-Advertiser; StarKist's ownership by Dongwon Industries via the US EPA and Mongabay.

Where the two sides disagree on facts — whether regulated fishing leaves a monument "protected," and what the reopening will actually yield — both readings are set out and attributed rather than adjudicated.