While Mexico defends ‘sovereignty,’ cartels import a flesh-eating parasite into Texas

As the New World screwworm returns to American soil for the first time since its eradication 60 years ago, Texas is now on the front line of Mexico's threat to U.S. sovereignty and national security.

The return of New World screwworm to the United States began with the collapse of the biological containment barrier in Central America that broke in 2021 when millions of illegal aliens were moved through the Darién Gap, overwhelming border controls and expanding the cartel-controlled smuggling corridors that later carried infested livestock northward. By the time Mexican authorities confirmed the first cases in November 2024, the parasite had already spread across Central America and deep into southern Mexico. Mexican officials’ complicity in cartel control over these routes turned mass migration into a gray-zone weapon that expanded smuggling infrastructure and increased pressure on the U.S.-Mexico border.

Mexican cartels function as de facto proxies for elements of the Mexican state in this gray-zone campaign. They move an estimated 800,000 cattle per year from Central America into Mexico through these same poorly governed corridors, using fake ear tags and falsified veterinary records to bypass government checkpoints, sanitary inspections, and taxes. The illicit trade is worth roughly $320 million annually. Once inside Mexico, the animals are laundered into the legal system, where they can enter feedlots or reach federally inspected Tipo Inspección Federal (TIF) slaughter plants used for domestic processing and exports. As of June 3, the New World screwworm has caused more than 171,700 cumulative animal cases and more than 2,070 human cases across Mexico and Central. Many infestations go undetected or unreported, so official figures likely understate the outbreak’s true scale.

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Elements of the Mexican state continue to protect cartel networks moving high-risk biological material toward the U.S. supply chain. In 2024, Mexico exported roughly 1.25 million head of live cattle to the United States at an estimated value of $1.3 billion. After the pause in the live cattle trade, Mexico rapidly expanded processed beef exports to the U.S., with exports rising 23 percent in the first four months of 2026 as cattle that would have been shipped live were instead finished and slaughtered domestically. NWS threatens more than a single agricultural market.

Presidential Policy Directive 21 defines critical infrastructure, which includes food and agriculture, as "systems and assets, whether physical or virtual, so vital to the United States that the incapacity or destruction of such systems and assets would have a debilitating impact on security, national economic security, national public health or safety, or any combination of those matters." The USDA warns that "this vital sector is a known target for terrorists and malicious actors." Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins has rightfully declared: "Food security is national security. If America cannot feed itself, it cannot fully defend itself — and that reality puts at risk the freedom and security that generations of Americans have fought and died to preserve over the last 250 years."

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In that light, Mexico’s abetting of NWS’s spread should be seen as the security threat it is. However, Mexico’s leaders continue to invoke sovereignty while practicing selective cooperation. AMLO’s "abrazos, no balazos" doctrine provided political cover for limiting action against cartel power, while AMLO and President Biden together presided over the mass movement of illegal aliens through cartel-controlled corridors toward the United States. Sheinbaum’s "cooperación sin subordinación" offers the diplomatic version of the same posture. Mexico engages when cooperation is limited to selected enforcement actions.

The return of NWS couldn’t come at a worse time for the American beef industry. U.S. cattle inventory has fallen to a 75-year low — the smallest national herd since 1951 — while beef imports have reached record levels. By maintaining high levels of agricultural trade while cartels control significant portions of the supply chain, including the laundering of smuggled cattle, Mexico deepens U.S. dependence. In 2025, the United States exported $30.6 billion in agricultural goods to Mexico but imported $43.9 billion from Mexico, leaving a $13.3 billion agricultural trade deficit. That dependence and offshoring our food is precisely the national-security vulnerability USDA has warned about. Secretary Rollins put it plainly: "Our beef cattle, our citrus, so much of this we’re now importing from other countries like Mexico. If we can’t feed ourselves, this is a national security issue that has to be solved."

Texas counties are on the front line of this incursion. The United States must not decouple trade policy from national security. No policy, protocol, or quarantine can protect America while Mexico’s cartel-state alliance keeps those routes open.

Ammon S. Blair is a Senior Fellow with the Texas Public Policy Foundation’s Secure & Sovereign Nation Initiative, where he develops state-led homeland defense strategies addressing transnational criminal organizations, foreign terrorist networks, hostile-state influence operations, weaponized mass migration, and emerging internal security threats. He is a former U.S. Border Patrol agent, a 22-year U.S. Army veteran, and a consultant to the Operation Lone Star Task Force.