Trump Reopens Half A Million Square Miles Of Protected Pacific To Commercial Fishing, Resolving Long-Standing Concern That The Ocean's Most Untouched Waters Remained Untouched

WASHINGTON. President Donald J. Trump on Wednesday signed a proclamation reopening nearly half a million square miles of Pacific marine national monuments to commercial fishing, resolving a long-standing concern within the administration that some of the most pristine and biologically intact waters on Earth had been allowed to remain pristine and biologically intact.

The proclamation, issued under the banner of the President's America First Fishing Policy, lifts protections across the Islands Unit of the Mariana Trench Marine National Monument, the Mau and Ho'omalu zones and waters seaward of 50 nautical miles within the Papahanaumokuakea Marine National Monument, and the waters between 12 and 50 nautical miles around Rose Atoll. Together the changes return roughly 500,000 square miles of ocean to federally managed commercial fishing, a category of management the administration distinguished from the prior arrangement, under which the fish were managed by not being caught.

The order states that 'appropriately managed commercial fishing' poses no threat to the scientific and historical objects the monuments were created to protect, reasoning that many of the species are migratory and therefore, in the document's framing, were leaving the protected areas anyway. NOAA, the agency that spent years studying and safeguarding the monuments, issued a statement expressing pride in supporting the effort to fish them, describing the reopening as the unlocking of economic opportunity that had been sitting unlocked in the form of a federally protected wildlife refuge.

'For too long these waters were closed to the American fisherman and open only to the fish,' said a source within the administration, characterizing the prior decade of protection as a regulatory burden that the migratory tuna had been getting away with. The official noted that the action builds on an April 2025 order that reopened portions of the Pacific Remote Islands Marine National Monument, and framed the new proclamation as completing the work of ensuring that no stretch of American ocean remains permanently safe from extraction.

The monuments, established across three administrations to protect coral reef systems, deep-sea habitats, seabird colonies, and one of the last largely undisturbed marine ecosystems on the planet, had been criticized by the Western Pacific Regional Fishery Management Council as an inefficient use of fish. Environmental and Native Hawaiian groups condemned the proclamation and vowed to challenge it in court, noting that the protected designation had been the entire point of the protected designation.

At press time, administration officials confirmed that the waters would be considered fully restored at the moment the first commercial vessel removed something that had been living in them.