By Nathan Strout
Published December 5, 2025

              The U.S. House Foreign Affairs Committee has approved the Stop Illegal Fishing Act, legislation that authorizes U.S. President Donald Trump to impose sanctions on foreign individuals and vessels that engage in illegal, unreported, and unregulated fishing (IUU) fishing.

              The authors of the bill say the measure is necessary to crack down on large foreign fishing fleets that have dodgy records on the environment and human rights – particularly China’s distant-water fleet.

              “Fleets of illegal fishing vessels are devastating sensitive fish populations, harming food security and local economies around the world. Nearly half of these vessels, 44 percent, originate from China. If Beijing won't hold these exploitive vessels and individuals accountable, the U.S. must. That is why we’ve introduced legislation that would grant the president power to impose sanctions on any individual or entity engaging in IUU fishing,” U.S. Representative Gregory Meeks (D-New York) and U.S. Representative Young Kim (R-California) said in a joint statement.

              The Stop Illegal Fishing Act would give the president the authority to impose sanctions on individuals who own vessels engaged in IUU fishing, those who hold leadership positions at companies engaged in IUU fishing, and captains and senior crew members on the vessels. Sanctioned individuals could have their U.S.-based assets frozen and their visas revoked.

              If passed, the legislation would require a report from the president to produce a list of all individuals and vessels sanctioned under the new law within 180 days.

              U.S. Representative Brian Mast (R-Florida), who chairs the House Foreign Affairs Committee, was highly critical of China’s distant water fishing practices.

              “It is a serious threat to coastal nations worldwide,” he said. “What it really is, it's harassment. It is mostly a middle finger from the Chinese Communist Party to neighboring and coastal countries. The Chinese Communist Party oversees the largest illegal fishing fleet. They deplete fish stocks. They violate maritime laws. They harm local economies across the globe.”

              U.S. lawmakers have grown increasingly critical of China’s seafood sector following the Outlaw Ocean Project’s reports documenting state-sponsored forced labor and other worker violations in the nation’s domestic processing sector and distant water fishing fleet.

              The first report, which was published in 2023, revealed evidence that the Chinese government was forcing members of the oppressed Uyghur population to work in seafood-processing plants, where they were subject to a litany of abuse. Follow-up reports alleged abusive working conditions on Chinese squid-harvesting vessels and the use of North Korean labor at seafood-processing facilities – a violation of international law. All told, the Outlaw Ocean Project alleged that at least 47,000 metric tons of seafood processed with Uyghur labor made its way to U.S. markets.

              During the 1 December markup of the Stop Illegal Fishing Act, U.S. Representative Chris Smith (R-New Jersey) – who chaired a Congressional-Executive Commission on China (CECC) hearing on “How Forced Labor in China Taints America's Seafood Supply Chain” shortly after the first Outlaw Ocean Project report dropped – urged his colleagues to support the bill.

              “China’s fleet is filled to overflowing with forced labor,” Smith said. “On the open seas, cut off from contact with the land, harsh and very cruel punishment is meted out to laborers, who are treated as slaves – wages are withheld. Captive peoples, especially the Uyghurs, are often conscripted onto these boats.”

              Smith and other lawmakers on the commission have called on the federal government to further investigate the seafood industry’s connections to forced labor and block seafood imports from China. Not long after the Outlaw Ocean Project revelations, U.S. Senator Tom Cotton (R-Arkansas) introduced the Ban China’s Forbidden Operations in the Oceanic Domain (Ban C-FOOD) Act, but no action was ever taken on the bill.

              While the U.S. has not outright banned Chinese seafood, the government has taken several actions targeting individual companies and restricting Chinese imports.

              In 2024, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security added seafood to its high-priority list for enforcing the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act (UFLPA) and banned imports from the Shandong Meijia Group under the same law. The U.S. Forced Labor Enforcement Task Force held three webinars last year on what the government was doing to enforce the UFLPA.

              Lawmakers are also currently pushing to pass the Fighting Foreign Illegal Seafood Harvest (FISH) Act, a bill that would establish a blacklist of vessels involved in IUU fishing and ban them from U.S. waters.

              “The FISH Act gives us more enforcement tools in response to illegal fishing,” U.S. Representative Val Hoyle (D-Oregon) said during a November hearing. “It creates a list for illegal vessels, holds vessel owners accountable, and improves tracking of foreign boats, which helps keep illegal seafood out of American stores through sanctions and import restrictions, protecting consumers and vulnerable workers.”

              The Senate passed the FISH Act as an amendment to the annual defense appropriations bill in October, but it’s not clear if that language will survive negotiations between the House and Senate. There are several differences between the two versions of the bill, including an amendment eliminating exceptions for seafood from the government’s “Buy American” provisions in the House bill and an amendment banning the military from buying seafood originating from or processed in China in the Senate bill.

              While the final compromised language on the defense bill was expected earlier this week, negotiations are ongoing.  


This article was published on December 5, 2025 and can be found online at: https://www.seafoodsource.com/news/supply-trade/us-house-committee-approves-stop-illegal-fishing-act