Fighting Foreign Illegal Seafood Harvests Act of 2025

Section 5 was completely restructured: broad Treasury property-blocking sanctions under IEEPA covering endangered species trade, IUU fishing participants, entity leaders, and material supporters were removed. The section now only imposes visa ineligibility and revocation on owners or beneficial owners of vessels on the IUU vessel list.

A new exception was added to Section 5: sanctions do not apply to a person listed as owner of a vessel through the use of force, threats of force, fraud, or coercion.

The consequences section (port access prohibitions, servicing prohibitions, import prohibitions for seafood from listed vessels, and fishing treaty advocacy priorities) and the enforcement/seizure-and-forfeiture section were removed from Section 4 and replaced with a brief 'Action' provision.

A new hearing right was added: beneficial owners whose vessels are placed on the IUU vessel list under subparagraph (A) (listed by an international fishery management organization) may request a hearing before the Interagency Working Group and present new evidence.

Removal standards for the IUU vessel list were changed: the specific 5-year clean period requirement was removed, consultation shifted from CBP to 'heads of other relevant agencies,' and a new requirement was added that removal standards be publicly available.

Inclusion criteria for the IUU vessel list were narrowed: the word 'knowingly' was added to two criteria (undermining RFMO measures and providing services to listed vessels), and the specific forced labor/WRO/Global Magnitsky language was removed from one criterion, simplifying it to just 'conducting IUU fishing.'

Annual funding for the IUU vessel list was cut from $20,000,000 to $10,000,000 per year for FY2025-2030. The National Academies study authorization was cut from $4,000,000 to $2,000,000.

New Section 13 extends National Sea Grant College Program authorization from FY2025 only to FY2025-2031, and extends a second funding paragraph from FY2021-2025 to FY2026-2031.

New Section 14 explicitly states the Act does not include any authority or requirement to impose sanctions on the importation of goods, defining 'good' broadly and excluding technical data.

New Section 15 provides a rule of construction stating nothing in the Act limits or affects any provision of law in effect on the date of enactment that is not amended by this Act.

Section 6 (agreements) added qualifiers limiting the President's consideration of IUU impacts: 'as long as such considerations do not come at the expense of higher priority national interests' and 'as long as clear burden sharing arrangements with partner nations are determined.' The UN Fish Stocks Agreement was removed from the list of treaties to encourage ratification.

The term 'black list' was replaced throughout with simply 'IUU vessel list.' The Commissioner of U.S. Customs and Border Protection was removed as a coordinating agency in multiple sections, replaced with generic 'heads of other relevant agencies.'