U.S. Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins said Tuesday that parasitic, flesh-eating screw worm flies were 25 miles from the U.S.-Mexico border, a new federal assessment that puts the pest at its closest known point to Texas since monitoring began in November 2024.
The warning lands as Texas ranchers search for hard numbers and fast answers. On Monday, state Rep. Don McLaughlin said the insects were one mile away and urged a Texas-led emergency response, while Rollins moved to correct the picture a day later. He has said for more than a year that he has joined ranchers in sounding the alarm as the threat crept north.
Rollins said McLaughlin was a well-intentioned state legislator, but she pushed back hard on the idea that loose claims help. False information about the flies, she said, causes significant panic, especially when it comes from elected officials and the media. The USDA said it would ramp up communication efforts after the new case was reported 25 miles from Texas, but it did not spell out a separate containment step.
The distance matters because the New World screwworm is not a routine pest. For more than three decades it had been eradicated, until cases reappeared in 2023 in Panama, Costa Rica and Nicaragua and then were confirmed in Mexico in November 2024. The fly burrows into the flesh of living animals and lays eggs in open wounds, a threat aimed primarily at livestock but one that can also infest pets, wildlife and humans.
McLaughlin’s case for action was blunt. He called on Gov. Greg Abbott, Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick and House Speaker Dustin Burrows to organize a Texas-led response modeled after Operation Lone Star, saying federal regulators had moved at a snail’s pace. Rollins’ update suggests Washington sees the same threat, but not the same distance, and that split is now part of the story.
What happens next is whether the federal government’s promised communications push becomes the kind of containment plan ranchers want. For now, the number that matters is 25 miles, and the question is whether Texas can keep it from becoming much less.
