Empty corrals at the Santa Teresa international livestock crossing. The incursion of parasitic fly into Mexico has interrupted livestock border trade for the last several months and is poised to continue. (Danielle Prokop / Source NM)

The nation’s largest border crossing for livestock between the U.S. and Mexico — in Santa Teresa, New Mexico — will not reopen as planned Monday, and is indefinitely delayed after further detection this month of the parasitic New World screwworm.

The crossing has been closed since May 11 when U.S. Department of Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins announced the immediate suspension of live cattle, horse and bison imports through the U.S., following the detection of the pest in southern Mexico states of Oaxaca and Veracruz, about 700 miles from the border. After the May closures, the USDA released a plan in early July to pursue staggered reopenings of livestock border crossings, which would have opened Santa Teresa on July 21.

However, unexplained cases detected further north in Mexico than expected re-closed all border crossings, New Mexico Department of Agriculture Secretary Jeff Witte told Source NM. While the ongoing closure’s direct impact on New Mexico agriculture is small, it has big implications for beef nationwide.

“Most of the cattle that come in through Santa Teresa end up going to other states’ feed lots or pastures, destined for places like Texas, Oklahoma, Kansas, Nebraska,” Witte said via a telephone interview. “At one time there were trucks from 17 different states picking cattle up.”

The movement of the parasitic fly, previously eradicated from the U.S. for the last several decades, has disrupted international cattle trade through New Mexico, Arizona and Texas in the last several months. The screwworm’s name references the maggot’s behavior of burrowing into the flesh of a living animal, sometimes causing serious or fatal damage to livestock, wildlife and pets. Human cases, while rare, have been documented.

The USDA also announced the construction of an $8.5 million facility to raise sterilized flies to prevent further breeding in the wild, located at Moore Air Base in Mission, Texas and an additional $21 million for producing more sterile files at a facility in Metapa, Mexico. USDA also said it would further increase monitoring and data-sharing with Mexico officials along the border.

However, Mexico’s agricultural agents detected a new case farther north in Veracruz, just 370 miles away from the border on July 7, prompting USDA to scrap the reopening plan.

“The United States has promised to be vigilant — and after detecting this new NWS case, we are pausing the planned port reopening to further quarantine and target this deadly pest in Mexico,” Rollins said in a written July 9 statement. “We must see additional progress combating NWS in Veracruz and other nearby Mexican states in order to reopen livestock ports along the Southern border.”

Daniel Manzanares, the director of the Santa Teresa international crossing, told Source NM that USDA has not said when the reopening will happen.

The crossing is privately owned by the Unión Ganadera Regional De Chihuhua Co-op, often moving cattle from Northern Mexico — in Chihuahua and Sonora — into U.S. feed lots. The pest has not been detected in the northern portion of Mexico, but cattle still can’t cross.

In prior years, about 270,000 animals would have crossed through the border by now, Manzanares said. This year, with the closures, only one third, or 74,000 have made it across, necessitating lay offs of half of the 32 hired hands for transporting cattle.

“It’s just severely impacted all kinds of industry down here, from the truckers that drive to the buyers, the cattle brokers, we’ve laid off employees that won’t come back,” he said. “It’s just breaking a lot of people.”

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