April 21, 2025 — An executive order issued by President Trump opens the Pacific Remote Islands Marine National Monument to fishing, asserting that U.S. environmental laws and regulation can adequately protect the islands’ marine ecosystem.
The move would allow fishing on more than 400,000 square miles west of Hawaii, declared a monument in 2009 by former president George W. Bush and expanded in 2014 by former president Barack Obama. It includes an array of reefs and seamounts around Wake, Baker, Howland, and Jarvis islands, the Johnston and Palmyra atolls and Kingman Reef.
U.S. Pacific fishermen and American Samoa officials and businesses have sought to lift restrictions on fishing, critical to the territory’s economy.
“As a result of the prohibitions on commercial fishing, American fishing fleets have lost access to nearly half of the United States’ Exclusive Economic Zone in the Pacific Islands,” according to the order Trump signed Thursday. “This has driven American fishermen to fish further offshore in international waters to compete against poorly regulated and highly subsidized foreign fleets.”
Read the full story at National Fisherman