The USDA has confirmed a second case of the New World screwworm in Texas cattle, a flesh-eating parasite once considered eradicated from American soil, and Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins says the federal government is racing to keep the outbreak from spreading further.
Rollins appeared on Fox News' "The Big Weekend Show" Sunday to lay out the threat and the response. She did not hold back about what South Texas ranchers are facing or about who she believes let the problem get this far.
The confirmation of a second case marks an escalation from what was already an alarming development. The first confirmed screwworm case in Texas since 1966 had already put the livestock industry on edge. Now, with a second infection verified, the question is no longer whether the parasite crossed the border, but how far it will go.
The New World screwworm is a parasitic fly that lays eggs in open wounds on livestock. The larvae feed on living tissue, and untreated infestations can be fatal to cattle. The United States spent decades and billions of dollars eradicating the pest, declaring it eliminated from American herds long ago.
Now it's back in South Texas.
Rollins told Fox News that the situation is a "really scary time" for ranchers, but she stressed that officials have their eyes on the problem and that early detection remains the best tool for stopping the spread.
"We've got eyes on the cattle in South Texas. Once we spot it, we can solve for it, which is why it's so important to report this."
She also offered some reassurance: the affected animals are expected to recover, the food supply will not be affected, and the risk to humans in the United States is historically low.
The primary weapon against the screwworm is a biological one. Rollins described a program in which roughly 10 million sterile flies are being released per week across Texas. When sterile males mate with wild female screwworms, the resulting eggs never hatch, gradually collapsing the population.
Rollins called this the "only way to defeat" the parasite's spread. She said the USDA is "building all of the infrastructure" to sustain and expand the effort.
The scope of the response, millions of sterile insects dropped from aircraft over Texas rangeland every seven days, gives some sense of how seriously federal officials are treating the threat. This is not a minor pest-control operation. It is a full-scale containment campaign for a parasite that, if left unchecked, could devastate the cattle industry across the southern United States.
The detection of screwworm cases near the Texas border in recent months had already raised alarms among livestock producers and agricultural officials watching the parasite creep northward.
The Agriculture Secretary did not treat the outbreak as a random act of nature. She tied it directly to border security, or, more precisely, to the lack of it under the previous administration.
Rollins said the parasite had been inching closer to the U.S. southern border during 2021 and 2022, a period she linked to what she described as lax border policies. She pointed to illicit cattle movement and Mexican cartel activity for breaking the containment barrier at the Darién Gap, the dense jungle corridor between Central and South America that had long served as a natural firewall against the screwworm's northward migration.
"We've got to beat it back... south of the border, back across the Darién Gap and eradicate this forever, and we're doing that."
Her sharpest criticism was reserved for the Biden administration's response, or absence of one.
"Of course, the last administration didn't do one thing about it."
Rollins described inheriting the problem when she took office. She said that early last year, someone presented her with models showing the screwworm would reach American soil by last summer. Her response, she said, was to prepare for the worst while trying to keep the parasite out.
"When we walked in early last year, someone presented me with all of this, and they said, 'All of the models are showing it will be in America by last summer,' and I said, 'Well, we've got to do everything we can to contain it, keep it out, and prepare to the point that if it does hit, we're going to be ready,' and that's where we are today."
That timeline matters. If the USDA's own models were forecasting a domestic screwworm outbreak during the Biden years, and the prior administration took no action, then the current crisis was not merely foreseeable, it was foreseen and ignored.
Rollins addressed whether the screwworm poses a danger to people. She said the risk to Americans is historically low but acknowledged that humans outside the country have been affected, particularly those traveling in large groups through areas where the parasite is active.
"If you have a gaping wound and you're moving through in the caravans, then some humans not in America have been affected, but it won't affect our country and humans."
That comment links the screwworm threat to the broader migration crisis, a connection that critics of open-border policies have been making for years. Uncontrolled movement of people and livestock across porous borders doesn't just create immigration problems. It creates agricultural and public-health vulnerabilities that take years and enormous resources to address.
The broader pattern of invasive species exploiting gaps in border enforcement and international trade is not limited to screwworms. Threats like the spotted lanternfly from China illustrate how quickly agricultural pests can establish footholds when containment systems break down.
Rollins was not the only official sounding the alarm. A photo caption from the Fox News report shows her alongside Texas Governor Greg Abbott at a news conference at the Texas State Capitol, where the two addressed the screwworm threat together. The joint appearance signals that both state and federal officials view this as a serious, coordinated emergency, not a localized nuisance.
The specific Texas county, ranch, or facility involved in the second case has not been publicly identified. Nor has the USDA disclosed which office or official formally confirmed the finding, or what testing methods were used. Whether any animals have been quarantined, culled, or relocated in response also remains unclear.
Those gaps matter. Ranchers across the state need specifics to protect their herds. Transparency about the scope and location of confirmed cases is essential to any containment strategy that depends on voluntary reporting, the very thing Rollins urged ranchers to do.
The recent Senate passage of a $70 billion border enforcement bill may provide additional resources for the kind of border-security infrastructure that could help prevent future agricultural threats from crossing into the United States.
The containment fight now extends well beyond Texas pastures. Rollins made clear the goal is not just to stop the screwworm in South Texas but to push it back south of the border and through the Darién Gap, reversing years of northward drift that she says went unaddressed.
That is a massive undertaking. The sterile-fly program is proven technology, but it requires sustained funding, logistical precision, and cooperation with Mexican authorities. Cross-border biological threats, from Ebola outbreaks in Africa to parasitic infestations in the Western Hemisphere, test governments' ability to act before a problem becomes a catastrophe.
For now, the USDA says it is ready. Rollins says the affected cattle will survive, the food supply is safe, and the infrastructure is being built. Whether that holds depends on how quickly the sterile-fly drops suppress the population, and whether any more cases surface in the weeks ahead.
Two confirmed cases. Models that predicted this outcome years ago. An administration that, by Rollins' account, did nothing. And ranchers left holding the bag in South Texas.
Borders matter for a lot of reasons. Protecting American cattle from a parasite that was eradicated a generation ago is one nobody should have had to learn twice.
