Nine US senators have written to Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent with a list of 29 ships and a simple argument: stop chasing the fishing boats and go after the vessels that keep them at sea.
The 23 July letter, led by Todd Young (R-Ind.), asks the Treasury's Office of Foreign Assets Control to add reefer carriers, bunker tankers and floating bases supporting China's distant-water fishing fleet - along with their owners and beneficial owners - to the Specially Designated Nationals and Blocked Persons list.
The logic is structural. Refrigerated carriers let catches be transferred at sea. Bunker tankers refuel. Floating bases supply food, medical care and parts. Together they mean a fishing vessel need never return to a port, which is precisely where inspection and enforcement actually bite. There are far fewer support ships than fishing boats, making them a smaller and more tractable target.
"China's distant water fishing fleet continues to disrupt global and regional fishing economies," Young said in a statement. "Through overfishing and illegal incursions into foreign waters, China seeks to undermine the global fishing industry until there is nothing left. The United States must take steps to combat these activities and promote American fishing practices, which remain the gold standard for sustainable fishing."
The signatories are Ted Cruz (R-Texas), Dan Sullivan (R-Alaska), Andy Kim (D-N.J.), Tom Cotton (R-Ark.), Chris Coons (D-Del.), Roger Wicker (R-Miss.), Rick Scott (R-Fla.) and Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.).
Their numbers are stark, if wide. The letter puts the Chinese distant-water fleet at somewhere between 2,000 and 16,000 vessels - a range that itself says something about how hard the fleet is to count - and claims it accounted for 44 percent of global fishing effort between 2022 and 2024, across 110 million hours in the waters of 90 countries, underwritten by billions in state subsidies.
Cruz was the least restrained.
"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," he said in a statement to SeafoodSource. "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."
Sullivan, whose Alaska constituents compete directly with the fleet's output, framed it as a matter of domestic livelihoods.
"Chinese trawl fleets ravage fish stocks in every corner of the world's oceans without regard for any other users or future generations. These fleets also engage in gross human rights abuses, including utilizing slave labor," Sullivan said. "We are urging Secretary Bessent to deploy the numerous Treasury Department tools and designations available to aggressively sanction these support vessels and dismantle the Chinese Communist Party's hub-and-spoke IUU fishing scheme."
There is precedent for the mechanism working. In December 2022, OFAC sanctioned two Chinese nationals and the networks they controlled under Executive Order 13818, which targets serious human rights abuse, adding more than 150 vessels to the SDN list. Designation typically cuts a ship off from flagging, insurance, financing, fuel, port services and buyers - and because vessels broadcast on automatic identification systems, they are comparatively hard to hide.
The letter sits on top of a stack of recent activity. Congress appropriated $170 million to the Coast Guard for maritime domain awareness in July 2025. The House Select Committee on China concluded in January that Beijing "wields the [distant-water fishing] fleet with the precision of a military command, fusing fishing vessels, state subsidies, processing plants, and overseas infrastructure into a unified geopolitical weapon." In March the Senate passed the Fighting Foreign Illegal Seafood Harvests Act, which would create a blacklist of vessels barred from US waters over illegal, unreported and unregulated fishing.
Separately, the Congressional-Executive Commission on China has written to President Trump asking for an outright ban on seafood caught or processed by China: "The reason is simple. Chinese seafood is too often produced through forced labor and enters our market at prices honest American fishermen cannot match. That is not competition. It is abuse shipped into the United States."
Much of the current momentum traces back to the Outlaw Ocean Project's investigative reporting from 2023 onwards, which documented forced labour aboard distant-water vessels and inside mainland processing plants. Other organisations have since corroborated the labour and conservation findings.
A letter is not a designation, and Treasury is under no obligation to act on any of the 29 names. But the request is narrower and more actionable than a blanket seafood ban, and it has signatures from both parties - which is more than most fisheries policy manages.
