Saving Seafood

Judge allows lawsuit challenging Trump’s wind energy ban to proceed

June 20, 2025 — A lawsuit challenging the Trump administration’s temporary ban on wind energy development throughout the United States can go forward, a federal court in Boston ruled Wednesday.

More than a dozen Democratic attorneys general sued over a Trump executive order suspending all federal wind energy approvals, citing the need for further review of their economic and environmental impact. U.S. District Judge William Young allowed the challenge to proceed against the Interior Department under the Administrative Procedure Act but dismissed several other claims based on different theories and involving other defendants.

Young said that his oral ruling from the bench was tentative and he reserved the right to alter his decision when he issues a written opinion.

Assuming Young’s oral ruling stands, both sides will submit motions for summary judgment that will be heard on September 4.

Read the full article at Courthouse News Service

Fishing council to ask Trump to lift fishing ban in Papahanaumokuakea

June 20, 2025 — The Western Pacific Fishery Management Council which sets fishing policies will ask President Trump to allow commercial fishing in the Papahānaumokuākea Marine National Monument in the northwestern Hawaiian islands. It’s the largest marine protected area in the world.

“That ask is to open waters of Papahānaumokuākea to commercial fishing. We may also include recreational fishing and subsistence fishing,” said Kitty Simonds, Western Pacific Fishery Management Council, executive director.

Simonds was in the Oval Office when President Trump signed the executive order in April to allow commercial fishing in a different preserve, the Pacific Island Heritage Marine National Monument around Johnston Atoll in the Central Pacific.

“It was very exciting for us,” said Simonds.

Read the full article at Hawaii News Now

Trump administration reverses aquaculture sector’s brief exemption from ICE raids

June 18, 2025 — U.S. aquaculture operations will not be exempt from the federal government’s increased worksite immigration raids, despite earlier reports that the administration of President Donald Trump would pause raids on large swaths of the food and hospitality industries.

In May, senior Trump officials instructed U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to ramp up arrests, and the agency has responded by conducting more aggressive raids to find and detain undocumented people in the country.

Read the full article at SeafoodSource

Trump Withdraws From Agreement With Tribes to Protect Salmon

June 13, 2025 — President Trump moved on Thursday to withdraw from a Biden administration agreement that had brokered a truce in a decades-long legal battle with tribes in the Pacific Northwest.

The federal government has been mired in legal battles for decades over the depletion of fish populations in the Columbia River Basin, caused by four hydroelectric dams in the lower Snake River. Native American tribes have argued in court that the federal government has violated longstanding treaties by failing to protect the salmon and other fish that have been prevented by the dams from spawning upstream of the river. That legal fight is now expected to resume, with no brokered agreement in place.

In its statement announcing the withdrawal, the White House made no mention of the affected tribes and portrayed the issue falsely as revolving around “speculative climate change concerns.”

The tribes had called for the dams to be breached as a way to restore the salmon population, a proposal that has faced intense pushback because of the potential costs. A study found that removing the four dams was the most promising approach to restoring the salmon population, but also reported that replacing the electricity generated by the dams, shipping routes and irrigation water would cost between $10.3 billion and $27.2 billion.

Read the full article at The New York Times

Opponents seek injunction to halt Empire Wind

June 13, 2025 — Commercial fishermen and opponents of the Empire Wind project asked a federal court to immediately halt pile driving and construction activity, weeks after the Trump administration allowed construction to resume.

The coalition, which filed a lawsuit June 3 in U.S. District Court, returned to ask for a preliminary injunction June 12, according to the group Protect Our Coast New Jersey.

Energy company Equinor would build an array of 54 turbines on its 80,000-acre federal lease near the approaches to New York Harbor. The plan dates back to December 2016 when Equinor (then known as Statoil) first won a lease sale by the federal Bureau of Ocean energy Management.

Commercial fishing advocates have long opposed wind projects in the area, citing nearby fishing grounds like the Mud Hole and Cholera Bank with historic mixed trawl fisheries, and sea scallops, the Mid-Atlantic’s most valuable fishery.

Protect Our Coast New Jersey contends the renewed construction poses “imminent, irreversible harm to marine life, fishing grounds, the seafood supply chain, and coastal economies.”

Read the full article at WorkBoat

Trump bid to shrink monuments could prompt big legal battle

June 13, 2025 –Armed with a new legal directive arguing that presidents have the power to abolish national monuments created by their White House predecessors, President Donald Trump is expected to move to eradicate or shrink sites — and trigger a legal fight that could find its way to the Supreme Court.

The Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) published an opinion Tuesday overturning nearly 90-year-old guidance that said presidents could not revoke national monument status.

Lanora Pettit, who serves as deputy assistant attorney general, wrote that the Antiquities Act of 1906 not only allows the president to set aside existing public lands to protect areas of cultural, historical or scientific interest, but also grants the power to rescind existing sites that “either never were or no longer are deserving of the Act’s protections.”

That opinion — which serves as legal advice to the executive branch, rather than a binding court ruling — could set the stage for a fresh legal battle over the 119-year-old law. Critics of the Antiquities Act have urged Trump to take the fight to the nation’s highest court and ensure the law is curtailed. The administration has been taking a look at monuments that could be targeted, focused on sites with the potential for mineral extraction.

“It’s quite obvious this opinion was done to try and justify something they plan to do going forward,” said Mark Squillace, the Raphael J. Moses professor of natural resources law at the University of Colorado Law School.

“That’s not to say the court might not agree with the opinion,” he added. “The court may be inclined to try and pull back on the Antiquities Act.”

Debate over the Antiquities Act tends to divide along political lines, with Republicans and other critics arguing that Democratic presidents have abused the law to set aside sprawling swaths of land that could otherwise be open to extractive industries, grazing or other uses.

Opponents have long seized on language in the law that requires a monument to “be confined to the smallest area compatible with proper care and management of the objects to be protected.”

But proponents point to decades of legal precedent supporting presidential prerogative to create monuments of any size, which dates back to President Theodore Roosevelt’s 1908 creation of what was then the 800,000-acre Grand Canyon National Monument.

The first Trump administration made clear it aligned with critics, initiating a massive review of monuments created since 1996 under then-Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke.

Read the full article at E&E News

Local, regional groups sue to halt Empire Wind project

June 13, 2025 — The U.S. government and several entities involved in the offshore Empire Wind 1 turbine project are being sued by environmental and fisheries groups seeking to halt construction, after an April stop work order on Empire Wind 1 was lifted by the U.S. Department of the Interior on May 19.

The plaintiffs in the suit, filed on June 3, hail from New Jersey, New York, Massachusetts, Connecticut and Rhode Island, and include groups like Protect Our Coast NJ, Clean Ocean Action Inc., Massachusetts-based ACK for Whales, the Fisherman’s Dock Cooperative in Point Pleasant Beach and Miss Belmar, Inc.

The suit alleges that the rescindment of the stop work order is “incomplete and failed to safeguard the ecology of our seacoast and the livelihoods it supports,” the plaintiffs’ lead counsel, Bruce Afran, said in a press release obtained by The Ocean Star last week.

“President Trump halted the Empire Wind project due to the Biden Administration’s failure to adequately assess the environmental harm posed by these offshore wind turbines and the impact on our coastal fishing industry,” he said. “None of those critical issues have been resolved. We are asking the federal court to reinstate the stop work order because the project’s federal approvals were incomplete and failed to safeguard the ecology of our seacoast and the livelihoods it supports.”

A representative from Equinor, the Norwegian multinational company that owns the Empire Wind project, did not respond to a request for comment by press time Thursday.

The plaintiffs contend that the project, which would place 54 wind turbines approximately 20 miles east of Long Branch in a triangular area of water known as the New York-New Jersey Bight, would cause environmental disruptions “in one of the Atlantic’s most ecologically sensitive areas.”

Read the full article at Star News Group

 

Trump can revoke national monument designations, Justice Department says

June 12, 2025 — President Donald Trump has broad authority to revoke protected land designated as national monuments by past presidents, the Justice Department said in a new legal opinion.

The May 27 legal opinion from the Justice Department found that presidents can move broadly to cancel national monuments, challenging a 1938 determination saying monuments created under the Antiquities Act cannot be rescinded and removed from protection.

The memo could serve as a legal basis to attempt to withdraw vast amounts of land from protected status. Trump’s administration wants to prioritize fossil fuel and energy development, such as drilling for oil and gas and mining for coal and critical minerals, including on federal lands.

“For the Antiquities Act, the power to declare carries with it the power to revoke,” the Justice Department memo states. “If the President can declare that his predecessor was wrong regarding the value of preserving one such object on a given parcel, there is nothing preventing him from declaring that his predecessor was wrong about all such objects on a given parcel.”

The DOJ memo mentioned two California national monuments designated by former President Joe Biden shortly before leaving office. In Trump’s first term, the president shrank the size of two national monuments in Utah, Bears Ears and Grand Staircase Escalante, and reduced the size of a national marine monument in the Atlantic Ocean.

Biden restored the three areas upon taking office and designated or expanded 12 national monuments during his term.

Environmental groups blasted the DOJ opinion.

Read the full article at CNN

Trump’s NOAA cuts clash with seafood competitiveness goals

June 12, 2025 —  During a Republican-led hearing touting U.S. President Donald Trump’s executive order on restoring American seafood competitiveness, Democrats and assembled witnesses questioned whether the administration’s actions align with its stated purpose.

“I hope to work with the administration and my colleagues and the majority to achieve that goal, but I don’t see how the administration is going to succeed when it spent the last four months haphazardly cutting the funding and workers that our fisheries rely on,” U.S. Representative Val Hoyle (D-Oregon) said during a House Water, Wildlife and Fisheries Subcommittee hearing title “Restoring American Seafood Competitiveness.”

Read the full article at the National Fisherman

SOUTH CAROLINA: McMaster, Fry call on White House to uphold ban on offshore oil and gas drilling

June 12, 2025 — Some of Donald Trump’s closest political allies are urging him to continue a moratorium on offshore gas and drilling leases along the South Carolina coast as the White House pursues its broader domestic energy policy.

“There is no question that our country must unleash American energy, expanding domestic production, cutting red tape and reassuring our energy independence,” U.S. Rep. Russell Fry, R-7th District, wrote in a Tuesday latter to Interior Secretary Doug Burgum. “At the same time, I believe energy development must be pursued in a way that respects the distinct economic and environmental realities of each region.”

Fry, a member of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, requested that Burgum keep in place a 2020 Trump memorandum exempting South Carolina from offshore oil and gas projects until at least 2032.

Read the full article at WBTW