![\"sunset](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/06\/Papahanaumokuakea-sunset.jpg\")
Sunset over Papah\u0101naumoku\u0101kea National Marine Sanctuary.\n Robert Schwemmer \/ NOAA<\/p>\n
When Kekuewa Kikiloi boarded a research vessel to visit the northwestern Hawaiian islands in 2002, he didn\u2019t know what to expect. Kikiloi grew up on O\u02bbahu, 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.\u00a0<\/p>\n
What he saw changed his life. \u201cThere\u2019s no places left in Hawai\u02bbi, 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,\u201d he told Grist. \u201cIt\u2019s so raw, the experience up there.\u201d<\/p>\n
The trip, a monthlong research expedition with scientists and Native Hawaiians, sparked decades of advocacy within the Hawaiian community for the protection of the Papah\u0101naumoku\u0101kea. \u201cIt 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 there\u02bbs a whole other side of our house that we didn\u02bbt know about. We have to know about this place,\u201d Kikiloi said. That support helped establish Papah\u0101naumoku\u0101kea as both a marine sanctuary and a marine national monument.\u00a0<\/p>\n
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 Hawai\u02bbi, American Samoa, and the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands, or CNMI: the Mau and Ho\u2018omalu Zones of the Papah\u0101naumoku\u0101kea 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 miles in the Pacific Ocean and are home to thousands of plant and animal species in some of the planet\u2019s most ecologically sensitive habitats. \u00a0<\/p>\n
Sunset over Papah\u0101naumoku\u0101kea National Marine Sanctuary.
\n Robert Schwemmer \/ NOAA<\/p>\n
The proclamation is Trump\u2019s latest attempt to dismantle conservation guardrails for industrial fishing. Last April, the president signed a proclamation<\/a> to open over 400,000 square miles of the Pacific Islands Heritage Marine National Monument to commercial fishing. He also issued an executive order<\/a> intended to boost domestic seafood production and his administration has continued to increase several fishery quotas<\/a>. Then, this February, Trump signed another proclamation<\/a> removing commercial fishing from the prohibited activities in two national monuments in the Atlantic.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cAMERICA FIRST FISHING POLICY,\u201d the White House posted on Facebook after this month\u2019s proclamation. \u201cMASSIVE WIN FOR AMERICA\u2019S FISHERMEN!\u201d During the signing in the Oval Office, Trump himself promised the move would generate \u201cmillions and millions of dollars in new business for our great, really great fishermen\u201d and lower seafood costs.\u00a0<\/p>\n Congresswoman Kimberlyn King-Hinds, the sole congressional representative from the CNMI, attended the signing, and said in a press release<\/a> that she hopes the federal government will work with local officials and communities to implement the directive\u00a0and that it creates jobs. \u201cFor the CNMI, ocean policy is local policy,\u201d she said. \u201cIf 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.\u201d<\/p>\n Numerous commercial fishers and groups have also hailed the president\u2019s move to rollback the restrictions in areas such as Papah\u0101naumoku\u0101kea. \u201cWe need to eat fish caught by our fishermen who follow U.S. laws,\u201d Kitty Simonds, executive director of the Western Pacific Regional Fishery Management Council, told Grist. Eric Kingma, executive director of the Hawai\u02bbi Longliners Association, told Honolulu Civil Beat<\/a> that he welcomed a review from the federal government \u201cguided by sound science\u201d on the scientific, economic, and cultural significance of the area, as well as management decisions that support \u201cthe long-term viability of Hawai\u2018i\u2019s longline fleet.\u201d After Trump signed the first commercial fishing proclamation last April, Kingma argued that ocean conservation and commercial fisheries can be compatible. \u201cWhat we like about opening these up is the opportunity to fish there when the fish are there,\u201d Kingma said at the time<\/a>.\u00a0<\/p>\n But the administration\u2019s strategy for boosting America\u2019s $319 billion-dollar<\/a> fishing sector has been riddled with unresolved legal questions.<\/p>\n Read Next<\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/a><\/p>\n Pacific Islanders slowly recover from the strongest storm of the year<\/a><\/p>\n In April of last year, just days after the president\u2019s 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<\/a>.\u00a0<\/p>\n 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\u2019s Atlantic Ocean proclamation earlier this year, NOAA Fisheries went through the formal rulemaking process to change the regulation that previously banned commercial fishing<\/a> in those monuments.<\/p>\n 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<\/a> 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. \u201cIt\u2019s anyone\u2019s guess what these folks are going to do, other than play fast and loose with the law,\u201d said Henkin.\u00a0<\/p>\n 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<\/a>. \u201cIf anyone gains to benefit from this, it\u2019s not going to be the traditional Indigenous communities,\u201d said Steven Mana\u2018oakamai Johnson, Kanaka Maoli from the island of Saipan and assistant professor at Cornell University. \u201cIt\u2019s going to be businesses, corporations, and those who have these larger vessels.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n Even in American Samoa \u2014\u00a0where tuna is the biggest export and support for commercial fishing is widespread \u2014\u00a0some are questioning the expansiveness of Trump\u2019s latest proclamation and its effect on Indigenous peoples. A year ago, Congresswoman Uifa\u2019atali Amata from American Samoa said of the Pacific marine monuments, \u201cNeither Presidents Bush, Obama, or Biden ever asked American Samoa what they wanted before they took away our Indigenous fishing rights without any science.\u201d But now Amata is concerned about how fishing around Rose Atoll could also infringe on Indigenous rights. \u201cAmata remains convinced that Rose Atoll should be off limits, her longstanding position, especially as she respects the cultural rights of the people of Manu\u2019a,\u201d her office said in a press release.\u00a0<\/p>\n Camilo Mora, a scientist at the University of Hawai\u02bbi at M\u0101noa, challenges the administration\u2019s 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 \u2014 highly protected areas where all extractive activity is banned make up about three percent<\/a>.\u00a0<\/p>\n Papah\u0101naumoku\u0101kea, 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\u2018omalu Zones of the area to commercial fishing, Mora warns, could trigger a trophic cascade \u2014 when a change in the top predator\u2019s population or behavior ripples throughout the food chain \u2014 that will then drive \u201call of these populations to collapse.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cWe are destroying the capacity of the oceans to make the food we need,\u201d said Mora.<\/p>\n For Kikiloi in Hawai\u02bbi, what\u2019s at stake is not just food \u2014\u00a0it\u2019s the ability for Indigenous people in Hawai\u02bbi to stay connected to their ancestors. He\u2019s not surprised that scientists like Mora have found some of the oldest living corals on earth in Papah\u0101naumoku\u0101kea, because Hawaiian oral histories describe it as the place where life began. \u201cIt\u2019s the place where our souls return to after death,\u201d he said. \u201cIt\u2019s hard to exist as Hawaiians nowadays if every aspect of your environment is degraded.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"When Kekuewa Kikiloi boarded a research vessel to visit the northwestern Hawaiian islands in 2002, he didn\u2019t know…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":719176,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[47],"tags":[245135,110,192,228630,245173,6382,111,79,6383],"class_list":["post-719175","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-environment","tag-climate-food-and-agriculture","tag-economics","tag-environment","tag-food-and-agriculture","tag-indigenous-affairs","tag-news-analysis","tag-politics","tag-science","tag-yahoo"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/719175","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=719175"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/719175\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/719176"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=719175"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=719175"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=719175"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"scattered](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/06\/Typhoon-Sinlaku-Saipan.jpg\")
<\/p>\n