Conservation Law Foundation v. Trump (2026 Northeast Canyons defense)

Roughly 130 miles off the coast of Cape Cod lies the Northeast Canyons and Seamounts Marine National Monument, our nation’s first and only marine national monument in the Atlantic Ocean. It encompasses a cluster of undersea canyons and seamounts and the exceptionally diverse ocean ecosystems that they support. This biodiversity hot spot offers food, shelter, and nursery habitat to a vast range of marine life, including puffins, whales, sea turtles, and numerous species of rare deep-sea, cold-water corals. President Barack Obama established the monument in 2016 to protect these ecosystems from damage by commercial fishing and other extractive activities, keeping them intact for future generations. 

The monument has survived several legal challenges. In 2017, five fishing industry groups filed a lawsuit seeking to abolish the monument and open it to commercial fishing. NRDC and our partners—the Conservation Law Foundation, the Center for Biological Diversity, and Zack Klyver, a whale-watch naturalist in Maine—intervened in the litigation to defend the monument’s legality. Both the D.C. District Court and the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals agreed with us that the president had authority to protect the Northeast Canyons and Seamounts as a national monument. The U.S. Supreme Court then declined to hear the case, meaning the commercial fishing industry’s attack failed at every level of the federal courts. 

Meanwhile, in 2020, President Trump signed a proclamation purporting to roll back protections by reopening this special area to commercial fishing. (NRDC and our partners swiftly filed a new lawsuit, Conservation Law Foundation v. Biden, challenging Trump’s unlawful move.) But before the court could rule on our case, President Joe Biden restored full protections to Northeast Canyons and Seamounts in 2021.  

Seemingly undeterred by the fishing industry’s multiple court losses, two additional sets of fishermen challenged Biden’s reinstatement of the monument protections. First, in April 2022, fishermen filed Fehily v. Biden; NRDC and our partners successfully intervened and brought discovery to test the fishermen’s claims that the monument harmed their economic interests. The fishermen then dropped the case.  

Next, in 2024, two more fishermen (represented by the same conservative legal group that brought the Fehily case) challenged the monument in Green v. Biden.* (NRDC and partners also intervened in Green; the case is currently stayed.)  

In February 2026, President Trump issued a proclamation claiming, once again, to open up the monument to commercial fishing. Then, in April 2026, the National Marine Fisheries Service issued a regulation claiming to implement the president’s proclamation, without any consideration for the harmful impacts of commercial fishing in the monument and without soliciting any public comment. Both the proclamation and the regulation were unlawful—between them, violating the U.S. Constitution, the Antiquities Act, the Administrative Procedure Act, and the Magnuson-Stevens Fishery Conservation and Management Act.  

So, on May 4, 2026, NRDC and our partners—the Conservation Law Foundation, Center for Biological Diversity, and Zack Klyver—sued to challenge President Trump’s proclamation and the unlawful regulation. Commercial fishing can harm ocean ecosystems by selectively removing large amounts of marine life, altering the food web. Gear such as heavy crab traps and lobster pots with fixed vertical lines can harm fragile and slow-growing deep-sea corals that support marine wildlife as well as capturing and entangling dolphins, sharks, seabirds, endangered whales, and sea turtles.  

Just like with previous attempts to strip protections from Northeast Canyons and other national monuments around the country, we are confident that President Trump’s effort to reopen the monument to commercial fishing will fail. And we will be there in court every step of the way to see that it does.  

*Note: The case name changed from Green v. Biden to Green v. Trump when President Trump took office in January 2025.