U.S. Senator Ted Cruz, Chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Subcommittee on Africa and Global Health Policy, sent a bipartisan letter to U.S. Treasury Secretary Bessent on July 24 outlining a strategy to counter illegal, unreported, and unregulated (IUU) fishing conducted by China’s distant-water fleet. The letter highlights vulnerabilities in China’s IUU fishing operations due to their reliance on a limited number of support vessels and calls for sanctions against these ships, specifically identifying 29 currently unsanctioned vessels.
The letter was co-signed by Senators Dan Sullivan, Andy Kim, Tom Cotton, Chris Coons, Roger Wicker, Todd Young, Rick Scott and Marsha Blackburn. Cruz said, “The Chinese Communist Party is using its global distant-water fleet to conduct ecocide across at least three continents in both hemispheres. They kill endangered species by the hundreds and sharks, whales, and dolphins by the thousands, and have destroyed tens of thousands of acres of coral reefs. Their fleet uses coerced laborers, who are subjected to physical abuse, malnutrition, overwork, and withheld pay. They could not conduct these activities without supply ships including reefers, tankers and floating bases. The U.S. should bolster our Maritime Domain Awareness capabilities to identify these vessels; then we should use every available option to sanction and disrupt them.”
Sullivan said that Chinese trawl fleets “ravage fish stocks in every corner of the world’s oceans without regard for any other users or future generations,” adding that they also engage in human rights abuses such as slave labor: “We are urging Secretary Bessent to deploy the numerous Treasury Department tools…to aggressively sanction these support vessels.” Kim said China’s practices threaten New Jersey’s fishing industries: “Without action global ecosystems and economies will suffer irreversible harm.” Cotton said that support vessels threaten maritime security: “We are encouraging Secretary Bessent to sanction these vessels.”
Coons commented that China’s illegal fishing undermines allies’ ability to fish off their own coasts: “It also hurts American fishermen who are undercut by cheap illegally harvested fish.” Wicker called for sanctions on Chinese ships threatening the American maritime economy while Young described China’s actions as disrupting global fisheries through overfishing.
Scott described forced labor practices as evil: “America needs to do everything we can to end this practice…protect American workers at the same time.” Blackburn said forced labor enables IUU fishing: “We are urging Secretary Bessent to counter this malign activity by sanctioning the support vessels…so we can ensure we are not doing business with them.”
Cruz serves as a senator representing Texas; he previously served as solicitor general of Texas and clerked for Chief Justice William Rehnquist on the Supreme Court; he graduated cum laude from Princeton University and magna cum laude from Harvard Law School; he champions constitutional liberties among other policy areas, according to the official website.