A Trump administration challenge to a three-month-old ban on the import of Mexican shrimp and other seafood caught by gillnet in the Upper Gulf of California was rejected by a federal court on 28 November.
Implemented under protections bestowed on the critically endangered vaquita porpoise by the Marine Mammal Protection Act, the seafood import ban has now been challenged unsuccessfully three times by the administration of U.S. President Donald Trump.
In the most recent ruling, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit confirmed a preliminary order implementing a federal law that requires a ban on seafood imported from Mexico’s Upper Gulf of California due to the danger gillnet fishing creates for the vaquita.
Just 15 individual vaquita remain, all living in the Upper Gulf of California, where they face extinction caused by entanglement in fishing nets. The Natural Resources Defense Council estimates that gillnets kill about 50 percent of the rapidly dwindling vaquita population every year…