The Cattle Border That Won’t Reopen
A flesh-eating pest has trapped USDA Secretary Brooke Rollins between the ranchers who cheered her rise and a White House desperate to cool record beef prices before the midterms.
For most of the past year, the fiercest fight over the U.S./Mexico border has not been about people. It has been about cattle — and about a flesh-eating fly most Americans had never heard of until it began chewing its way back toward Texas. USDA Secretary Brooke Rollins is now caught in the middle of it, facing what Politico describes as mounting pressure from her own ranching allies to reopen the southern border to Mexican livestock, even as her department keeps it firmly shut. We have for months reported on this friction.
The pest is the New World screwworm, a parasite the United States spent decades and hundreds of millions of dollars eradicating in the twentieth century. Its larvae burrow into the open wounds of warm-blooded animals — livestock, wildlife, pets, and occasionally people — and can kill a full-grown steer within weeks. After the fly re-emerged in southern Mexico in late 2024 and marched steadily north, USDA has now confirmed 35 cases in Texas and New Mexico, the first domestic detections since the 1960s. What began as an abstract threat is now a resident one.
A closure that outlived its logic
Washington’s first instinct was to wall the pest out. USDA shut the border to Mexican cattle in November 2024, briefly reopened it, then closed it again in May 2025 as new detections surfaced south of the line. A tentative, phased reopening at Douglas, Arizona, in July 2025 was scrapped within 48 hours. The gates have stayed shut since. Rollins, a Texan who built her political identity as a champion of ranchers, argues the closure bought the industry critical time — delaying the pest’s arrival by roughly a year and sparing producers a potentially catastrophic outbreak.
Her critics, a growing coalition of ranchers, meat processors, lawmakers, and even some administration officials, increasingly question whether that logic still holds. The screwworm is already here, they note. Inspected commercial cattle, they argue, could cross safely under strict checkpoints, quarantines, and monitoring — the same protocols that governed the trade for decades. Former USDA officials warn of a perverse side effect: choke off the legal, inspected channel, and you invite cattle smuggling, which carries far greater disease risk than a supervised port of entry. And screwworm, spread by wild animals and stray pets as readily as by livestock, pays no attention to whether a feedlot gate is open or closed.
The supply squeeze behind the sticker shock
The economic stakes are what have turned an animal-health dispute into a political one. In a normal year, the United States imports between 1.1 and 1.2 million head of Mexican feeder cattle — roughly three to three-and-a-half percent of the national feeder supply, and a much larger share for the feedlots of the Southwest. In 2025, with the border mostly sealed, that flow collapsed to around 230,000 head. The crossing at Santa Teresa, New Mexico, which alone handled about half of all Mexican cattle imports at some 1,500 animals a day, went quiet; the New Mexico corridor is worth roughly a billion dollars a year.
Figure 1. Mexican feeder-cattle imports collapsed in 2025 as the border stayed closed, tightening supplies just as retail beef prices pushed toward records. Sources: USDA/APHIS; U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics; industry trade data (figures approximate).
That shortfall landed at the worst possible moment. The U.S. cattle herd is already at a 75-year low after years of drought, leaving Southwestern feedlots underused and hungry for animals. Retail ground beef, which sold for around $5.65 a pound in early 2025, climbed to roughly $6.75 by January 2026 and brushed $6.90 in the spring — record territory. Feeder-cattle futures touched historic highs near $379. Analysts estimate the Texas-Oklahoma-New Mexico region could produce a billion fewer pounds of beef this year than it otherwise would. For a White House watching grocery prices ahead of the midterms, beef has become an uncomfortably visible line item.
A rift inside the administration
The result, as Politico reports and this reporter has previously reported on, is a genuine rift inside the Trump administration. Rollins has reportedly resisted advisers who favor reopening the border to bring in more beef and take some heat out of consumer prices. The White House, more attuned to the politics of inflation, has leaned the other way. Complicating the calculus is a strategic worry shared by some Republicans: that the longer Mexican cattle are kept out, the more likely Mexico is to retain those animals, build out its own beef-processing capacity, and emerge as a stronger competitor — a lasting shift in the cross-border trade that a temporary closure could make permanent.
Figure 2. The New World screwworm re-emerged in Mexico in late 2024 and has since been confirmed in Texas and New Mexico, while the border ports that once channeled Mexican feeder cattle remain closed. Schematic; locations approximate. Sources: USDA/APHIS; industry trade data.
For all the friction, the outlines of a compromise are visible. Industry groups broadly support reopening the border eventually, but with safeguards — layered inspections, quarantine, and surveillance — rather than a wholesale return to the old rules. Restoring even a partial flow of Mexican feeder cattle, they argue, would add badly needed animals to Southwestern feedlots, ease the processing crunch, and help normalize a distorted market, even if import volumes never fully return to where they were.
The deeper problem is that Rollins is being asked to optimize for two things that pull in opposite directions: keep a devastating pest at bay, and keep beef affordable. The screwworm’s presence on U.S. soil has, if anything, sharpened the dilemma rather than resolved it, because the animal-health rationale for a total closure weakens by the week even as the political cost of high prices grows. Whatever USDA decides, the episode is a reminder of how tightly America’s dinner-table economics are stitched to a fragile, cross-border supply chain — and how a single insect can pull the whole thing taut.
