# Pacific Islands Heritage Marine National Monument Seven scattered US island units across the equatorial Pacific — Baker, Howland and Jarvis Islands; Johnston, Wake and Palmyra Atolls; and Kingman Reef — protected as a single monument since 2009 and expanded to nearly half a million square miles in 2014. It is the first monument the second Trump administration tried to open to commercial fishing, and therefore the first place the legal theory got tested in court. ## The record | Date | President | Instrument | Result | |---|---|---|---| | Jan 6, 2009 | [[George W. Bush]] | Proclamation 8336 | Established, ~86,888 sq mi, ~50 nm around each of seven units | | Sep 25, 2014 | [[Barack Obama]] | Proclamation 9173 | Jarvis, Wake and Johnston expanded to the full 200-nm EEZ — **total ~490,343 sq mi** | | Jan 2, 2025 | [[Joe Biden]] | Proclamation 10880 | Renamed **Pacific Islands Heritage MNM**, recognizing Native Hawaiian, Samoan, Chamorro, Carolinian and other Pacific Islander cultural connections | | Apr 17, 2025 | [[Donald Trump]] | Proclamation 10918 | Opens waters **50–200 nm** to US-flagged commercial fishing — ~310,000 sq nm | The 2014 expansion left Baker, Howland, Kingman Reef and Palmyra at 50 nautical miles. The three units Obama expanded to 200 nm are exactly the three Trump reopened in 2025. A Biden-era proposal would have layered a **national marine sanctuary** over the monument plus adjacent unprotected EEZ — roughly 770,000 square miles. It went through public scoping in spring 2023 and never advanced to a draft environmental impact statement or proposed rule. As of August 2026 NOAA's page still reads "review of public comments"; there is no withdrawal notice and no draft documents. It is stalled, not formally cancelled. ## The April 2025 proclamation and what happened to it **Proclamation 10918, "Unleashing American Commercial Fishing in the Pacific"** (90 FR 16987), signed April 17, 2025, amends the 2009 and 2014 proclamations and permits US-flagged vessels to fish commercially between 50 and 200 nautical miles of the monument's landward boundaries — the bands off Johnston Atoll, Wake Island and Jarvis Island. The same day, Trump signed Executive Order 14276 directing Commerce and Interior to review all marine monuments and recommend which to open. **Note the sequencing.** The proclamation came **five and a half weeks before** the [[Office of Legal Counsel]] issued its May 27, 2025 opinion on revoking monument designations. The legal opinion followed the action rather than authorizing it — and in any case the opinion addresses *revocation and boundary reduction*, not the removal of management protections inside unchanged boundaries. That third mechanism is what this proclamation actually uses, and it had no OLC blessing at the time. **The litigation.** *Kāpaʻa, Conservation Council for Hawaiʻi, and Center for Biological Diversity v. Trump*, No. 1:25-cv-00209 (D. Haw.), filed by [[Earthjustice]] on May 22, 2025 before Judge Micah W.J. Smith. Claims under the [[Antiquities Act]], separation of powers and the Take Care Clause, the [[Administrative Procedure Act]], the Magnuson-Stevens Act, and the [[National Environmental Policy Act]]. **On August 8, 2025 the court granted summary judgment for the plaintiffs and vacated the National Marine Fisheries Service letter** that had announced the monument was open — because NMFS had bypassed Magnuson-Stevens notice-and-comment rulemaking. The government conceded the point. The court held that no commercial operator could reasonably rely on the letter; fishing had to stop immediately. **But read the ruling narrowly, because the headlines did not.** The court did **not** rule on the legality of Proclamation 10918. It blocked the *agency implementation*, not the proclamation. The Antiquities Act and separation-of-powers claims remain undecided, with a non-jury trial reported for December 7, 2026. As of mid-June 2026 the Congressional Research Service reported commercial fishing still prohibited under NOAA regulations. As of August 14, 2026 no fishing has resumed and no appeal has been taken. That distinction is the entire live question: if the proclamation is lawful, proper rulemaking will eventually end the monument's status as a no-take reserve. The August 2025 win bought time, not a holding. ## KB significance **1. It is the test case.** Everything the administration has since done to [[Papahānaumokuākea Marine National Monument]], the Mariana Trench and Rose Atoll monuments in June 2026 runs on the mechanism first attempted here — amend the management regime, leave the boundaries alone, find that existing fisheries statutes suffice. Whether that works is being decided in a Honolulu courtroom, not in Utah. **2. It exposed the procedural chokepoint.** A proclamation is not self-executing. The prohibitions live in agency regulations, and removing them requires rulemaking. The government lost in August 2025 by skipping that step — and the Atlantic response was to skip it more aggressively, invoking the APA's "good cause" exemption to rescind the Northeast Canyons restrictions without public comment in April 2026, which is now itself being litigated in D.D.C. **3. The remoteness is the point, in both directions.** These are uninhabited islands thousands of miles from any US voter. That is why they could be protected at enormous scale by proclamation with almost no political cost — and why they can be reopened the same way. Nearly all American ocean protection is concentrated where nobody lives, which makes the national statistics impressive and the political constituency thin. --- *See also: [[Papahānaumokuākea Marine National Monument]] · [[Antiquities Act]] · [[Antiquities Act Timeline]] · [[30x30 Conservation Initiative]]*