Who Owns the Submerged Mariana Islands?

Despite several suits by the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands (CNMI), a federal judge has recently declared that the U.S. owns the 264,000 square miles of submerged islands that are part of the archipelago. The judge in the case decided that the submerged lands could not be part of CNMI unless they were specifically deeded to them by the U.S. Since all the Marianas were trusted to the U.S. after World War II and only some became part of the Commonwealth in 1978, it was up to U.S. Congress, the judge stated, to specifically give the submerged lands to CNMI.