Governor of Northern Mariana Islands Passes Away in Guam

Aug 1, 2025 - 10:03 Updated: Aug 1, 2025 - 01:43

Governor of Northern Mariana Islands Passes Away in Guam

Northern Mariana Islands Gov. Arnold Indalecio Palacios died in Guam last week at age 69 after collapsing in his Capitol Hill office in Saipan and being transferred to the neighboring island for specialized care.

After collapsing on July 23, Palacios was taken to Saipan’s Commonwealth Health Center, where doctors recommended he be transported to Guam, 120 miles to the south, for specialized care at Guam Regional Medical City. His office said he died in Guam at about 10:37 p.m. local time that day.

The cause of death has yet to be made public.

Lt. Gov. David Apatang announced his death that evening and was immediately sworn in as acting governor for the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands (CNMI).

“A dedicated public servant for more than three decades, Governor Palacios served the people of the CNMI with unwavering commitment, compassion, and integrity,” Apatang said in a statement. “He will be remembered as a unifier, a steady hand during times of challenge, and a leader who never wavered in his belief in the strength and resilience of the people he served.”

Palacios was elected governor in 2023. He dedicated many years to public service, serving four terms in the Commonwealth’s House of Representatives, where he was speaker from 2008 to 2010. He was later appointed secretary of the Department of Lands and Natural Resources from 2012 to 2015, served two terms in the territorial Senate, and was Senate president from 2017 to 2019. In 2018, he was elected lieutenant governor.

In 2022, he made history by winning the gubernatorial race as the Commonwealth’s first independent governor, before rejoining the Republican Party in late 2024.

During his time in government, Palacios became known for his leadership in areas such as labor viability, immigration, and military projects in the Mariana Islands. He also championed environmental stewardship and conservation of the Commonwealth’s natural resources and sustainable economic development, and governance.

Palacios was also an unyielding voice in calling out the Chinese Communist Party’s infiltration of CNMI society and related corruption.

“It is in the interests of national and global security for the United States government to protect and fortify its Pacific territories and allies of the Freely Associated States of Micronesia (FAS) against the growing threat of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP),” he said during a 2023 committee hearing on natural resources.

“America’s security architecture in the Pacific is not only founded upon military defense; it is also built on and inseparable from the pillars of economic, social, and political stability in the region. It is based upon the rule of law and the resilience of democratic institutions. It is rooted in economic prosperity and the health of people and ecosystems. It hinges upon genuine, trustworthy relationships and shared commitments, backed by action, to a free and open Indo-Pacific.”

He was among a handful of Pacific Island leaders to openly warn about the dangers of economic overreliance on China, outlining the resulting risks of political and security manipulation by Beijing.

In a February speech at the Department of Interior’s Interagency Group on Insular Areas, Palacios said his administration’s priority continued to be diversifying the Commonwealth’s economy to avoid the “historically untenable and unhealthy over-reliance on China.”

On April 24, Palacios formally wrote to Kimberlyn King-Hinds, a delegate to the U.S. House of Representatives from the CNMI, urging her to work with him to seek federal assistance from FBI Director Kash Patel for “intensive investigations of public corruption” in the CNMI, saying that he had “considerable evidence to provide to the Bureau as soon as they resume a permanent presence in the Commonwealth.”

He previously told the Foundation for Defense of Democracies in Washington in 2024 that when he came into office, he had tried to determine how approximately $1.6 billion in federal funding given to the CNMI during the COVID-19 pandemic era had been spent.

“The last thing we want to do, or want to see, is for the CNMI community to suffer over a long period of time because of some of the careless squandering, or even criminal squandering, of resources that were given to us by the federal government,” he said at the time. “We saw it, I saw it, a lot of people in the community saw it happening. And so we wanted that to be validated by a robust financial investigation. We needed to come clean. I wasn’t about to cover up all these things.”

Palacios asked the federal government on multiple occasions for assistance with the investigation, according to Grant Newsham, a retired U.S. Marine Col. and senior fellow at the Center for Security Policy.

The Epoch Times contacted the FBI for comment but did not receive a response by publication time.

In July, the FBI said in a letter to King-Hinds that in 2019, it had executed search warrants in Saipan, and then-Gov. Ralph Torres confirmed to the media that the warrants had been executed, including at his Capitol Hill office.

Newsham also said on July 28 that the “considerable success” of influence operations by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) in the CNMI puts at risk U.S. military efforts “to bolster its Pacific defenses by measures such as refurbishing World War II era airfields in CNMI.”

He was referring to the Pentagon’s investment in the Tinian Divert Airfield project and other infrastructure upgrades on the island of Tinian, which could serve as a contingency site if Andersen Air Force Base on Guam is compromised.

The CNMI’s location in the Western Pacific makes it a strategic position in the Indo-Pacific, where the CCP has for decades been trying to outcompete U.S. influence and undermine its allegiances. The Commonwealth has a population of around 45,000.

Tributes to a ‘True Patriot’

Tributes flowed in from across the Pacific, from U.S. Indo-Pacific Command and the House Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party to fellow governors and government officials.

“We are deeply saddened by the passing of Governor Arnold I. Palacios of the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands,” the House committee said in a July 25 statement. “He was a devoted public servant and a true patriot who courageously stood against Chinese coercion, steadfastly defending the sovereignty of the CNMI and the American homeland. His principled leadership and unwavering dedication to his people will leave a lasting legacy and will not be forgotten.”

Hawaii Gov. Josh Green said in a statement, “Jaime and I send our deepest condolences and warmest aloha to the family, friends, and constituents of Governor Arnold Palacios, of the [CNMI], who passed away suddenly on Guam while receiving emergency medical treatment.”

King-Hinds said in a July 23 statement posted to social media that her emotions were “too raw to fully express what a loss this is for our Commonwealth.”

“What I do know is that Governor Palacios was a good man. He was our Governor and served the people of the Marianas with honor,” she said. “But more than that, he was a husband, a father, and a grandfather who loved his family deeply. My heart is with First Lady Wella and their family in this incredibly difficult moment.”