Sullivan leads a push to sanction ships supplying China's fleet

Nine U.S. senators are asking the Treasury Department to sanction 29 named ships that resupply China's distant-water fishing fleet, arguing the fleet's cheap, illegally harvested catch undercuts American fishermen.

Alaska's Dan Sullivan and Texas's Ted Cruz led the bipartisan letter to Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, released Thursday. It targets the fleet's support vessels rather than the fishing boats themselves — the reefers, tankers and floating bases that let trawlers stay at sea for months — and asks Treasury to add them, and their owners, to the sanctions list kept by the Office of Foreign Assets Control. Seven other senators from both parties co-signed.

The senators describe the fleet's catch as illegal, unreported and unregulated fishing, or IUU, and allege it relies on coerced labor and kills endangered species — characterizations the letter attributes to the senators, and which the Chinese government and the vessels' owners were not asked to answer. "We've identified another powerful channel to target these evasive IUU fleets," Sullivan said, "by tightening the screws on the relatively few support vessels" that sustain them.

Sullivan, who is running for re-election this year, has made foreign illegal fishing a signature issue; his Fighting Foreign Illegal Seafood Harvest Act passed the Senate in March, and Alaska Rep. Nick Begich has a related House bill.

Not every Alaskan sees foreign fleets as the state's central fisheries problem, though. Some argue that homegrown pressures — trawl bycatch, warming oceans, and conditions in domestic fisheries — do more damage to Alaska's fish than imported catch.

The tool the senators want used is a real one. In December 2023, OFAC sanctioned two people and related entities and flagged 157 vessels tied to China. Whether Treasury acts on this request is up to the department, which has not responded publicly.