Under Donald Trump’s second presidency, U.S. Coast Guard crews in Hawaii and the Pacific are set to be busy. But it’s not entirely clear what that will actually look like amid major shake-ups across the federal government.
On his first day in office, Trump fired Coast Guard Commandant Adm. Linda Fagan during his inauguration ball. In a statement, the Department of Homeland Security said she was fired because of an “excessive focus on diversity, equity and inclusion,” as well as a “failure to address border security threats” and the Coast Guard’s long-standing recruitment struggles.
Trump also signed several executive orders calling for beefing up border security to crack down on migrants, asylum seekers and drug smuggling. Adm. Kevin Lunday, the Coast Guard’s acting commandant, said in a statement that “per the President’s Executive Orders, I have directed my operational commanders to immediately surge assets — cutters, aircraft, boats and deployable specialized forces — to increase Coast Guard presence and focus.”
Lunday said this would take immediate effect in several areas, including the U.S. border approaching Florida “to deter and prevent a maritime mass migration from Haiti and/or Cuba” and “the maritime border around Alaska, Hawaii, the U.S. territories of Guam, the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands, American Samoa, Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands.”
But it’s unclear what that actually means here in Hawaii. When asked for details on what assets are surging into the Pacific in support of the executive order — and what they will actually do in the islands — a Coast Guard spokesperson at the service’s Washington, D.C., headquarters said in an emailed statement that “we are unable to provide specific details on the number of personnel and their exact locations to ensure operational security and the safety of our crews; however, we remain fully operational and committed to the mission.”
Coast Guard operations in Hawaii and America’s Pacific island territories fall under the service’s District 14, which is headquartered in Honolulu at the Prince Kuhio Federal Building. In addition to rescue operations and port security, in recent years the service has focused on protecting fisheries from illegal overfishing and partnering with Pacific island nations — efforts that began ramping up during Trump’s first presidency.
In addition to patrols in U.S. waters, the Coast Guard frequently also patrols international waters. The U.S. is a member of the Western and Central Pacific Fisheries Commission, which is made up of several regional countries. In international high-seas waters, officials from member countries have authority to board vessels to make sure they aren’t violating environmental regulations.
The U.S. Coast Guard also regularly patrols the waters of other Pacific island nations, many of which lack navies or coast guards of their own to protect and police their vast maritime territories. Those patrols frequently involve “ship riders” from those countries — officials operating aboard U.S. Coast Guard vessels that essentially give them legal authority to conduct boardings and enforce local laws and regulations.
Protecting stocks of migratory fish that people across the Pacific’s islands — including here in Hawaii — rely on to feed their families has been seen as an inherently international effort. In 2020 the Coast Guard declared that illegal fishing had surpassed high-seas piracy as the No. 1 global security threat at sea, arguing that it destabilizes economic and food security in coastal communities and encourages other forms of crime and corruption.
Several Coast Guardsmen in Hawaii told the Star-Advertiser it’s not completely clear to them yet what the new executive order means for them. One said that in the short term the service is perfectly able to step up patrols in U.S. territorial waters but that in the long term it could strain Coasties and might require diverting resources from other missions.
The new shake-ups come as the the U.S. and China have been competing for influence across the Pacific islands, with the Coast Guard playing a central role. In October 2020, Trump’s then-National Security Adviser Robert O’Brien announced plans to beef up the Coast Guard’s presence in the region with new vessels on Guam and to study the feasibility of stationing one in American Samoa.
In a conference call with reporters in the region, O’Brien said, “This will be quite an expansion of our U.S. Coast Guard capability in the Western Pacific. This capability will allow us to expand opportunities to partner with like-minded nations in the region.” He said it was in part aimed at confronting illegal fishing by China’s large state-subsidized fleet, which he described as “a marauding band of fishing trawlers that come through and strip fish and then dump garbage and plastic all over the ocean.”
Under the presidency of Joe Biden, the effort to build up the Coast Guard’s Pacific presence continued. Three new fast-response cutters were stationed on Guam to support operations in Micronesia, with even more planned. The Coast Guard also stationed the medium-endurance cutter CGC Harriet Lane in Honolulu as the new “Indo-Pacific Support Cutter” focused on operations across Oceania.
In February, Fagan visited several Pacific island nations and briefly joined the crew of the Harriet Lane at sea to observe operations during its first patrol in the region. But as Beijing and Washington compete for influence across the Pacific islands, countries’ leaders nearly unanimously say they regard climate change and rising sea levels as their No. 1 threat and challenge.
Trump has repeatedly called climate change a “hoax” and has promised to roll back environmental regulations, slash renewable energy projects and increase oil production. A crew member of the Harriet Lane told the Star-Advertiser he was concerned that could undermine the Lane’s mission to build partnerships in Oceania, rhetorically asking, “How can anyone out here take us seriously if we only believe in climate change (depending on who the president is)?”
A report on American involvement in the Pacific by the Heritage Foundation, a think tank closely aligned with the Republican Party, said, “The current era of great power competition between the U.S. and China requires elevating the Pacific Islands to a higher level of importance when considering resource allocation.” The report said that under Biden the U.S. had “overemphasized” climate change as a “vital American interest” in its dealings with the Pacific — but it also argued the U.S. might need to engage with climate change talks “to be taken seriously in the region.”
Anna Powles, a Massey University professor specializing in the Pacific, told the Australian Broadcasting Corp. in a recent interview that if the Trump administration doesn’t take island nations’ concerns about climate seriously, “very soon it will find a region in which China has even deeper engagement than it did last time, and it’ll find a region which does view U.S. engagement fairly cynically.”
