Commercial fishing that recently resumed in a vast protected area of the Pacific Ocean must halt once again, after a judge in Hawaiʻi 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 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 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 in the remote central Pacific Ocean southwest of Hawaiʻi. 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.
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 Hawaiʻi’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.
