By Rep. Marissa Flores, CNMI House of Representatives Floor Leader
Let me start with something simple.
There are members of the United States Congress who cannot pronounce the word Marianas.
Think about that. The people making decisions about our economy, our ocean, our immigration, our taxes — decisions that affect every family on these islands — cannot say our name. And if they cannot say our name, I have to ask: do they know who we are? Do they know we existed long before the United States was a country? Do they understand that we did not become American through surrender — we entered this union voluntarily, by choice, through a negotiated agreement called the Covenant?
I do not think they do. And that is the root of every problem I am about to describe.
“We are not a territory the United States inherited. We are not a base, a buffer zone, or a bargaining chip. We are the people of the Marianas — Chamorro, Refaluwasch, and every family that came here and chose to belong — and we have been here since long before anyone in Washington drew a line on a map and called it governance.”
My name is Marissa Renee Flores. I am a daughter of these islands. I serve as House Floor Leader of the 24th Northern Marianas Commonwealth Legislature. I am writing this for my people — for the voter, for the fisherman who knows these waters by name, for the family doing the math every month on what it costs to live here and wondering how much longer they can hold on.
I want to say something before I go any further. In the United States right now, there is red and there is blue. There is division, there is noise, and there is a political war being fought on every channel and every platform. I understand that world exists. But the Marianas is neither red nor blue. We are not a partisan cause. We are not a talking point. We are a people — and the problems I am about to describe are not Republican problems or Democratic problems. They are problems that every administration, from both parties, across decades, has either created or failed to fix. Our ocean does not vote along party lines. Our Covenant was not signed by a party. Our ancestors did not navigate these waters by ideology. We are united by something older and deeper than any political season in Washington. And I am speaking today not as a partisan voice — but as a daughter of these islands, to every person who calls the Marianas home.
I am writing this because we are not here to conform. We are here to thrive. And there is a federal government — regardless of who controls it — that has been standing in the way of that for a very long time.
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In 1975, our people voted to enter into political union with the United States. We did not have to. We chose to — because we were offered a real partnership. The result was the Covenant to Establish a Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands in Political Union with the United States of America, ratified by Congress as Public Law 94-241.
Read that word. Commonwealth. Not territory. Not colony. Not possession. The Covenant guaranteed our right to self-government. It guaranteed that federal rights over our land and our adjacent waters would only be obtained by clear agreement and express lease — not assumed, not taken, not inherited by silence.
That was the promise.
Here is what has happened instead.
“The Jones Act — a shipping law written in 1920 for the continental United States — is applied to our islands in the middle of the Pacific. It forces every ship carrying goods between American ports to be American-built, American-owned, American-crewed. For us, that means everything we import costs more than it should. It is not a shipping regulation. It is a structural tax on island life, and Congress has known that for decades and done nothing about it.”
Cabotage restrictions strangle our ability to move goods and people efficiently through our own waters. Federal immigration takeover in 2009 stripped us of the labor policies we built our economy around — the Covenant Workers who raised their children here, built our hotels and hospitals and schools, have been held in legal limbo ever since. Not resolved. Not protected. Renewed in short increments, year after year, for nearly two decades. Managed instability, imposed on the most vulnerable people in our community.
Section 603(b) of the Covenant — the provision that directs federal corporate tax revenues derived from CNMI sources back to our Treasury — has been disputed by the IRS to the tune of approximately $20 million. Our own Covenant money, withheld. And military activity on our soil — activity that generates enormous revenue for the federal government — returned only $87,000 in fees and taxes to the CNMI on $153 million of work. That was confirmed in a Ways and Means Committee hearing in July 2025.
In February 2026, we exercised our right under Section 902 of the Covenant to formal consultations with the federal government. We asked for $429.1 million over seven years to address what federal policy has cost us. The answer: no funding vehicle. The Interior Department’s 30-day follow-up report is still overdue.
“What vehicle did they use to send billions to countries that are not even allies of the United States? We are the tip of the spear in the Indo-Pacific. The United States wages its wars from our region, extracts the strategic value of our location, and then tells us there is no funding vehicle when we ask for what our own Covenant guarantees. That is not partnership. That is extraction.”
I introduced House Joint Resolution 24-12 to require that the Legislature — the President of the Senate and the Speaker of the House — be seated at the table in every future Section 902 consultation. The branch of government that holds the people’s power of appropriation cannot be absent from negotiations that determine whether our people have an economy. Not anymore.
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Now I need to tell you about our ocean. Because what is happening there may be the most important thing I will ever write.
The federal government — through the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, BOEM — has identified over 69 million acres of CNMI seabed for potential deep-sea mining leases. Cobalt, nickel, platinum, copper, rare earth elements, gold. Materials the United States defense and technology industries have declared strategic priorities. A lease auction is scheduled for November 2026 — five months from now. Under current law, every dollar of royalties from those leases goes directly to the U.S. Treasury. Not one cent to the CNMI. Not one cent to our people.
I need you to understand how we got here — because the history of how we lost control of these waters is a story that begins with a gap in time, not a gap in our rights.
When the Covenant was signed in 1975, the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea had not yet been written. President Reagan’s 200-mile Exclusive Economic Zone did not exist yet in American law. The legal architecture that would define who owns the ocean floor beneath these islands was still seven years away. Our negotiators could not ask for what the law had not yet named. And by the time UNCLOS was concluded in 1982, the Covenant window had closed.
So we fought. The Legislature passed the Marine Sovereignty Act in 1980. Federal courts struck it down. We sued all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court. Cert denied. The ruling: you did not ask for it in the Covenant, so it was not granted. Three decades of fighting. We lost — not because we were wrong, but because the timing of history was used against us.
It took until 2013 — three unanimous House votes, and the sustained work of Delegate Kilili Sablan — for Congress to finally convey the 0-to-3-mile coastal zone back to us. The deep-water ocean floor beyond 3 miles stayed in federal hands. Now that jurisdiction is being used to schedule a mining auction.
“These seamounts have names in our language. They appear in our creation stories. Our ancestors navigated by them. The ocean is not empty water to us — it is a living landscape that belongs to us, and we to it. When Washington proposes to mine that floor, they are not talking about extracting minerals from an uninhabited federal asset. They are talking about destroying something that is part of who we are. And they scheduled the auction without asking us first.”
BOEM received 65,585 public comments. The overwhelming majority opposed this. Over 940 marine scientists worldwide have called for a moratorium. Guam’s Legislature passed a unanimous resolution opposing it. Palau, the FSM, and the Marshall Islands have all called for a pause. The United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples requires free, prior, and informed consent before any development project affecting Indigenous peoples’ territories. We are Indigenous peoples. These are our territories.
On April 10, 2026, I introduced House Joint Resolution 24-14 to put the Legislature’s position on the record — firmly, legally, and permanently. It rests on five pillars:
The Covenant itself: Sections 801-803 establish that federal rights over our lands and adjacent waters could only be obtained by clear agreement and express lease. The silence of 1975 was not consent. It was a gap — and a gap is not a deed of transfer.
The Trusteeship legacy: The Trust Territory’s public lands — including submerged lands, tidelands, and lagoons — were held in fiduciary duty for the benefit of our people. That duty did not expire when the Trusteeship ended. It cannot be erased by a federal leasing calendar.
Our own Constitution: Article XI of the NMI Constitution states that submerged lands off our coast are public lands belonging to the people of the Northern Mariana Islands. Article XII says those lands and resources are to be preserved for our benefit. Not auctioned. Preserved. For us.
What Congress must do: Congress proved in 2013 that it has both the power and the moral obligation to act on this. We are asking it to finish the job — convey ownership, or at minimum vested beneficial ownership and primary control, of our seabed within 12 nautical miles, and of all marine resources throughout our 200-mile EEZ. Subject only to powers expressly reserved for national defense and navigation.
Who we are: The CNMI is not an ordinary U.S. territory. We entered this union through a Covenant — a mutual, binding agreement. We are not a colony. We are not a conquest. We are a people in political union with the United States, and we are asking for what has always belonged to us.
HJR 24-14 has been transmitted to President Trump, Senate Majority Leader Thune, Speaker Johnson, the chairs of both Natural Resources Committees, Delegate King-Hinds, Governor Apatang, and Attorney General Manibusan. The Legislature’s position is established. Congress must now act.
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There is one thing the federal government could do tomorrow — at zero cost — that would immediately begin to rebuild our tourism economy.
In March 2025, I introduced House Joint Resolution 24-1 requesting that the Republic of the Philippines be included in the Guam-CNMI Visa Waiver Program. More than 15,000 Filipino residents already live here — nearly 35% of our entire population. Their families cannot visit without enduring a 56-day appointment backlog at the U.S. Embassy in Manila. The Hotel Association of the Northern Marianas Islands says visa-free access would bring over 400,000 new visitors a year to our islands. South Korea — a comparable U.S. treaty ally — already has visa-free access. The Philippines has a Mutual Defense Treaty with the United States since 1951. Their e-Passports meet every DHS security standard.
That resolution was introduced fifteen months ago. Washington has not acted on it.
“Four hundred thousand visitors a year. Zero cost to the federal government. One regulatory decision. And it has sat for fifteen months while our tourism economy struggles to survive. That is what I mean when I say Washington does not feel what we feel. They are not in a hurry because it is not their family counting the months.”
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I want to speak directly now — not to Washington, but to my people.
I know how tired you are. I know the electricity bill went up and the paycheck did not. I know you are watching businesses close and wondering whether the next generation will have a reason to stay. I know you have heard promises before. I am not here to make promises. I am here to name what is happening, to stand in the way of it, and to make sure that the record of this moment reflects the truth of who we are.
We are not here because someone gave us permission to exist. We are here because we have always been here. The ocean outside your window is not a federal resource — it is your inheritance. The language you speak, the food on your table, the names you call the wind and the current and the place where two seas meet — that is your sovereignty. No law passed in Washington without our consent can take that from us.
And I say this to every person reading this, whatever your background, wherever you came from before you came here: the divisions that consume Washington do not have to consume us. The Marianas has never been red or blue. We have always been one people facing one ocean, building one community. That is our strength. That is what they have never understood about us — and what they will never be able to legislate away.
To the federal government, I say this as plainly as I know how:
Honor the Covenant — fully, not selectively. Fix the Jones Act for island economies. Resolve the immigration status of the Covenant Workers who built this community. Release the Section 603(b) revenues the IRS is sitting on. Deliver the 902 working group report that is overdue. Act on the Philippines Visa Waiver. And before you auction a single acre of our ocean floor, come here — not for a meeting, not for a conference — stand on our shore. Look at what you are proposing to take. Then come back and tell us there is no funding vehicle.
“They came here in conquest. They came back in contracts. Some of those who came on contracts fell in love with this place and came back as family — and those people understand what I am saying, because they learned what it means to belong to the Marianas. But Washington, as an institution, has never learned it. We are still waiting. And while we wait, we are building the case, filing the resolutions, and writing the history ourselves.”
I am a daughter of the Marianas.
I am Marianas first. And the history of these islands will be written by its people — not by those who cannot pronounce our name.
Editor’s note: The views and opinions expressed in this op-ed are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of NMI News Service or its staff. All assertions are the sole responsibility of the writer. To submit an op-ed for consideration, email your piece to brad.ruszala@nminewsservice.com.