In June, U.S. agriculture officials confirmed the country’s first case of New World screwworm in 60 years.
These are flesh-eating parasites that bore down into the skin of animals like cows, dogs, and goats. They pose a serious risk to ranchers, so the U.S. Department of Agriculture has spearheaded an aggressive response to the outbreak.
But new reporting by Reuters highlights a weakness in the U.S.’s screwworm response: A lack of control over illegal livestock trafficking in parts of the U.S.-Mexico border.
Cassandra Garrison, a Mexico-based reporter for Reuters, spoke to Texas Standard about the threat posed by the illicit movement of animals.
This transcript has been edited lightly for clarity:
Texas Standard: You recently took a deep dive into what you describe as animal smuggling along the U.S.-Mexico border. Is it clear what sort of impact this is actually having on screwworms in the U.S.?
Cassandra Garrison: It’s not clear whether or not smuggling has been linked to any cases in the U.S. because there’s less than 50 confirmed cases in the U.S. at this time and the USDA has not linked any of those specifically to smuggling.
But what’s important to remember here is that obviously this is operating outside the bounds of what would be normal reporting, normal protocol and revisions and health certifications. That’s why it’s such an important point, and that’s why it’s kind of raising alarm bells with officials right now, because it’s something that’s totally unmonitored, so it’s hard to know what kind of impact is happening.
What sort of livestock are we talking about here and could you explain a little bit more about how these illegal networks seem to be operating?
Sure. So cattle have always been involved. It was probably a lot easier to move cattle illegally across the U.S. border when the ports of entry were still open to livestock.
A lot of other animals continued moving across the border, including during the closure due to screwworm. Horses were one of the main live commodities that we heard over and over again from veterinarians, from law enforcement. Even federal officials told us about that.
Why horses? There’s a demand for horses in the black market in the United States. Some of them are really high-end, well-bred horses used for racing, for equestrian sports like rodeos and charro, a Mexican horse tradition.
And sometimes it’s just they’re moved to they’re moved across the border because they’re also used for smuggling people or drugs. We’ve even heard some cases about drugs being hidden inside the animals, really disturbing cases. And we’ve also heard from other officials who told us about exotic animals that get moved from Mexico to the United States. Again, there’s a demand.
Are the animals coming over in like tractor-trailer trucks? Is that typically how they’re brought into the United States or through other means?
There’s two ways. Sometimes they’re moved through the ports illegally because they’ve got some falsified paperwork.
Other times they’re moving on foot across the border in kind of rugged border zones. So they’re actually being walked, literally horses are walked across some parts of the river where it’s shallow enough to do so. And then there’s a trailer waiting on the other side where those animals are loaded up and then moved onwards into the United States.
I gather that last month you visited some remote communities along the Texas-Mexico border to talk with some local officials, sheriffs, veterinarians, border patrol agents. How did they describe the challenge of policing the area?
It’s such a broad, expansive zone. I’d actually never been to this part of the country before. And I think before that, it was hard to visualize really what officials are up against in terms of policing the border because it’s so dry, it’s so hot, it is so difficult to move and to really like have eyes there all the time.
I mean, we’re talking about thousands of miles of border. Not all of it is monitored. And that makes it very difficult to have eyes on these parts of the border a hundred percent. It’s almost impossible.
Cassandra, obviously, you are sounding an alarm about concerns over illegal smuggling and the fight against the New World screwworm. Do you get a sense that officials on either side of the border are taking it seriously as well?
Well, it’s something that U.S. officials literally just started speaking publicly about recently. And I spoke to the USDA Inspector General John Walk for the story, and he had gone to Texas a few weeks prior to that to meet with local law enforcement and meet with federal officials specifically because he wanted to warn them about the risk that illegal animals smuggling from Mexico to the U.S. poses in the threat of screwworm because obviously it’s a black market, there’s no oversight, and he had been sort of picking up on the risk that that posed.
We also have heard [Agriculture] Secretary Brooke Rollins talk a little bit about it recently, saying that cracking down on animal trafficking was going to be a main priority for the USDA, but that’s pretty new.
But it does seem like now it’s slightly more on the radar of officials than it was before. Local law enforcement told us they’ve been aware of this for a long, long time. Veterinarians and former government officials had confirmed that to us as well.
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