American fishermen have been playing by the toughest rules on earth while foreign fleets cheat. In Fort Myers on Friday, President Trump’s team took their side. The Administration unveiled the America First Seafood Strategy and launched Seafood.gov, a one-stop site for fishermen and families who want to buy American.
HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. told the crowd what Gulf shrimpers are up against. In Vietnam and Cambodia, he said, companies “fence off a mangrove swamp, they poison the fish in it, they grow shrimp,” and the shrimp are “so loaded with antibiotics and disinfectants that no European country will take them. They ship them all over here.” Fort Myers shrimpers, he said, “have to compete against criminal enterprise abroad.”
“President Trump is rebuilding the infrastructure, he’s reopening the markets for our commercial fishermen,” Kennedy said, “and today he’s announcing a label for all American-made seafood that says it’s American-made.”
Under the plan, the FDA is proposing a voluntary “U.S. Caught Seafood” label, available on Seafood.gov. The President is also making more than $5 billion in USDA guaranteed loans available to expand American meat and seafood processing. The Strategy cuts red tape on waterfronts, cold storage and processing plants, and goes after illegal fishing, mislabeled imports and heavily subsidized foreign seafood.
It builds on the President’s record. He signed an order in April 2025 to restore American seafood competitiveness and has reopened commercial fishing in all Marine National Monuments, giving back hundreds of thousands of square miles of ocean to American fishermen. “For too long, Federal seafood policy focused on regulation and market contraction rather than production and growth,” the White House said. “The America First Seafood Strategy reverses that approach.”
