Trump officials play Biden blame game as screwworm spreads

As cases of New World screwworm spread and threaten the beef and cattle industry, the Trump administration is rolling out a familiar playbook: Blame former President Biden.  

The parasitic fly had been eliminated in the U.S. since the 1960s, but now it’s back, and according to Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins, the new resurgence is entirely due to the lax immigration policies of former President Biden’s administration.  

“The threat didn’t appear overnight; it was the direct result of the Biden-Harris Admin’s WEAK foreign policy agenda and FAILED immigration policies,” Rollins wrote in a social media post last week. 

In a CNBC “Squawk Box” interview Monday, Rollins continued to point fingers at Biden. 

“Under the last administration with the massive movement under the open borders policy, the cartels, etc., border security, that’s when [screwworm] began to make its way back up toward America, hitting Mexico in early 2023, moving its way up through Mexico in 2024,” Rollins said. 

The screwworm is a fly larva that eats living flesh instead of dead material. It has a track record of decimating livestock.  

There are currently five confirmed cases: three calves and a goat in Texas and a dog from Lea County, N.M.   

The government had been able to keep screwworm contained at the southern end of Panama for decades, in large part due to a program that breeds sterile male flies and drops them from planes to mate with wild females. 

The U.S. had created a barrier by constantly releasing sterile flies in the area south of Central America since the early 2000s. That effort was aided by the difficult terrain of the Darién Gap, a mountainous rainforest that separates Panama from Colombia.  

But for the past few years, the insect has been making its way north from South America.  

In 2022, the flies overcame the insect barrier and the Darién Gap. Panama began to report dozens of cases, and by 2024, flies........

© The Hill