When Kekuewa Kikiloi boarded a research vessel to visit the northwestern Hawaiian islands in 2002, he didn’t know what to expect. Kikiloi grew up on Oʻahu, but like a lot of Native Hawaiians, he had never had the opportunity to visit the uninhabited islands and atolls scattered to the west of the main islands.
What he saw changed his life. “There’s no places left in Hawaiʻi, or very few places, where the environment is so wild and intact that you have your ancestors who are embodied in the environment communicating with you every second: birds hovering over you, monk seals swimming up to you, fish trying to bite you,” he told Grist. “It’s so raw, the experience up there.”
The trip, a monthlong research expedition with scientists and Native Hawaiians, sparked decades of advocacy within the Hawaiian community for the protection of the Papahānaumokuākea. “It ended up being this amazing journey of rediscovery for a lot of us. When we came back to the main Hawaiian islands, we started telling the community about how thereʻs a whole other side of our house that we didnʻt know about. We have to know about this place,” Kikiloi said. That support helped establish Papahānaumokuākea as both a marine sanctuary and a marine national monument.
Now Kikiloi is worried those protections are under threat. Earlier this month, President Donald Trump issued an executive proclamation to allow commercial fishing in parts of three national marine monuments in Hawaiʻi, American Samoa, and the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands, or CNMI: the Mau and Ho‘omalu Zones of the Papahānaumokuākea Marine National Monument, the Rose Atoll Marine National Monument, and the Islands Unit of the Mariana Trench Marine National Monument. Collectively, the areas under the proclamation span roughly half a million square milesin the Pacific Ocean and are home to thousands of plant and animal species in some of the planet’s most ecologically sensitive habitats.
The proclamation is Trump’s latest attempt to dismantle conservation guardrails for industrial fishing. Last April, the president signed a proclamation to open over 400,000 square miles of the Pacific Islands Heritage Marine National Monument to commercial fishing. He also issued an executive order intended to boost domestic seafood production and his administration has continued to increase several fishery quotas. Then, this February, Trump signed another proclamation removing commercial fishing from the prohibited activities in two national monuments in the Atlantic.
“AMERICA FIRST FISHING POLICY,” the White House posted on Facebook after this month’s proclamation. “MASSIVE WIN FOR AMERICA’S FISHERMEN!” During the signing in the Oval Office, Trump himself promised the move would generate “millions and millions of dollars in new business for our great, really great fishermen” and lower seafood costs.
Congresswoman Kimberlyn King-Hinds, the sole congressional representative from the CNMI, attended the signing, and said in a press release that she hopes the federal government will work with local officials and communities to implement the directive and that it creates jobs. “For the CNMI, ocean policy is local policy,” she said. “If American fishing activity grows in these waters, our goal should be to connect that activity to local jobs, local businesses, port activity, seafood infrastructure, and long-term food security for the Commonwealth.”
Numerous commercial fishers and groups have also hailed the president’s move to rollback the restrictions in areas such as Papahānaumokuākea. “We need to eat fish caught by our fishermen who follow U.S. laws,” Kitty Simonds, executive director of the Western Pacific Regional Fishery Management Council, told Grist. Eric Kingma, executive director of the Hawaiʻi Longliners Association, told Honolulu Civil Beat that he welcomed a review from the federal government “guided by sound science” on the scientific, economic, and cultural significance of the area, as well as management decisions that support “the long-term viability of Hawai‘i’s longline fleet.” After Trump signed the first commercial fishing proclamation last April, Kingma argued that ocean conservation and commercial fisheries can be compatible. “What we like about opening these up is the opportunity to fish there when the fish are there,” Kingma said at the time.
But the administration’s strategy for boosting America’s $319 billion-dollar fishing sector has been riddled with unresolved legal questions.
In April of last year, just days after the president’s April 2025 proclamation, the National Marine Fisheries Service, or NOAA Fisheries, announced in a letter to fishing permit holders it had reopened commercial fishing in the Pacific Islands Heritage Marine National Monument. That ban was lifted for nearly four months, until last August, when a federal district judge ruled, in a lawsuit filed by the nonprofit law firm Earthjustice, that the move violated the federal rulemaking process.
Earthjustice attorney David Henkin believes that the lawsuit, which he led, may have prompted the administration to change its strategy for revising industrial fishing regulations. This shift became evident when, after the president’s Atlantic Ocean proclamation earlier this year, NOAA Fisheries went through the formal rulemaking process to change the regulation that previously banned commercial fishing in those monuments.
Still, there is another, more fundamental legal question that Henkin says remains open. Though Congress has absolute authority over the use and management of federal lands and waters, the Antiquities Act of 1906 also gave the president the authority to designate certain federal water and lands containing scientific, historic, or cultural resources as protected monuments. No federal court has yet ruled whether the Antiquities Act allows a president to undo a national monument or their protections, though several cases are pending. Earthjustice is again preparing to challenge the administration in court. “It’s anyone’s guess what these folks are going to do, other than play fast and loose with the law,” said Henkin.
Opening these areas to commercial fishing has the additional effect of edging out traditional Indigenous fishers, who not only tend to practice smaller-scale, more sustainable fishing, but are also largely exempt from the commercial fishing bans in protected waters. Indigenous fishers, for instance, still retained the right to subsistence fish under the protections Trump just stripped back within the Mariana Trench Marine National Monument. “If anyone gains to benefit from this, it’s not going to be the traditional Indigenous communities,” said Steven Mana‘oakamai Johnson, Kanaka Maoli from the island of Saipan and assistant professor at Cornell University. “It’s going to be businesses, corporations, and those who have these larger vessels.”
Even in American Samoa — where tuna is the biggest export and support for commercial fishing is widespread — some are questioning the expansiveness of Trump’s latest proclamation and its effect on Indigenous peoples. A year ago, Congresswoman Uifa’atali Amata from American Samoa said of the Pacific marine monuments, “Neither Presidents Bush, Obama, or Biden ever asked American Samoa what they wanted before they took away our Indigenous fishing rights without any science.” But now Amata is concerned about how fishing around Rose Atoll could also infringe on Indigenous rights. “Amata remains convinced that Rose Atoll should be off limits, her longstanding position, especially as she respects the cultural rights of the people of Manu’a,” her office said in a press release.
Camilo Mora, a scientist at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa, challenges the administration’s argument that deregulation will create jobs and strengthen the fishing sector. Mora has long studied the relationship between biodiversity, fisheries, and the global food system, and argues any short-term economic benefits of the move will be offset by the long-term ecosystem losses. Most U.S. waters, in any case, are already open to commercial fishing — highly protected areas where all extractive activity is banned make up about three percent.
Papahānaumokuākea, for one example, is one of the largest marine protected areas in the world, and is a refuge for rare and ecologically significant species. The Hawaiian monk seal, humpback whales, and green sea turtles are among the more than 7,000 species found there, many of which are critically endangered. Opening up the Mau and Ho‘omalu Zones of the area to commercial fishing, Mora warns, could trigger a trophic cascade — when a change in the top predator’s population or behavior ripples throughout the food chain — that will then drive “all of these populations to collapse.”
“We are destroying the capacity of the oceans to make the food we need,” said Mora.
For Kikiloi in Hawaiʻi, what’s at stake is not just food — it’s the ability for Indigenous people in Hawaiʻi to stay connected to their ancestors. He’s not surprised that scientists like Mora have found some of the oldest living corals on earth in Papahānaumokuākea, because Hawaiian oral histories describe it as the place where life began. “It’s the place where our souls return to after death,” he said. “It’s hard to exist as Hawaiians nowadays if every aspect of your environment is degraded.”