Mexican lettuce just put 1,600 Americans in the hospital with a parasite – and nobody in Washington saw it coming.
Now a Senate hearing has exposed how deep the foreign food inspection failure goes.
What John Kennedy got Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins to say out loud in that hearing room nobody in Washington wanted on the record.
John Kennedy Has Been Warning About Imported Shrimp Safety Since Biden Blocked His Inspection Bill
Nine out of ten shrimp on American plates come from overseas. Senator John Kennedy (R-LA) has been saying so in committee rooms and on the Senate floor for years – and getting ignored for most of it.
The Louisiana Republican pushed a foreign seafood inspection bill in 2023. Senate Democrats killed it that December. He pressed then-Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo in May 2024 on the health risks from imported shrimp and crawfish. Nothing moved.
Then in August 2025, the FDA found something that made the warnings impossible to dismiss. Cesium-137 – a radioactive isotope produced by nuclear reactions – turned up in frozen shrimp shipped from an Indonesian company called PT. Bahari Makmur Sejati.
The shrimp had been sitting in Walmart stores across Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, Louisiana, Missouri, Mississippi, Ohio, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, Texas, and West Virginia, sold under the Great Value label.
Kennedy went to the Senate floor with a blown-up photograph of the alien from the 1979 film Alien and said what every Gulf shrimper already knew.
"The shrimp was radioactive," he said. "I kid you not."
https://twitter.com/JenniferShutt/status/1963349627404755008
The FDA issued eight separate safety alerts tied to imported shrimp in the months that followed.
Rollins Confirmed Imported Shrimp Is Loaded With Antibiotics and Nobody Is Inspecting It
Kennedy was back in a hearing room – pressing Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins during a Senate Appropriations Committee session.
He asked whether domestic shrimpers and oyster harvesters qualify as farmers. Rollins said yes. He asked whether foreign producers were raising seafood in open ditches and dosing it with antibiotics. Rollins said yes to that too, without hesitation.
Kennedy kept going.
"And if you eat too much of that foreign shrimp and oysters, you'll grow an extra ear, won't you?"
"I'm not sure about that," Rollins answered, "but I know it is not good. And I also know we import 90% of our shrimp."
Kennedy pressed: "Why aren't we inspecting the shrimp and the oysters from abroad?"
Rollins pointed upstream. "Why are we importing so much from abroad, which goes to the president's trade agenda?"
Trump signed Executive Order 14276 – Restoring American Seafood Competitiveness – in April 2025, directing federal agencies to crack down on unsafe imports, block forced-labor seafood, and build an America First Seafood Strategy. In April 2026, Rollins announced the first-ever USDA Office of Seafood to implement it.
How Biden's FDA Left Americans Eating Foreign Shrimp With Banned Antibiotics
Under Biden, the FDA inspected less than 1% of all foreign food facilities in 2024. The Southern Shrimp Alliance reported that federal agents refused 81 foreign shrimp shipments that year for contaminants – a record refusal count going back nearly a decade – with the previous administration silent on every one of them.
Foreign shrimp routinely arrives packed with antibiotics banned in the United States. Cesium-137 was the headline, but it was never the whole story.
When Americans consume enough antibiotic-laced shrimp, those drugs accumulate in the body – and the medications that fight bacterial infections stop working.
After Kennedy's Senate floor speech in September 2025, HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. announced the FDA would increase shrimp inspections immediately. The FDA placed imported shrimp on its 2026 priority list. In October 2025, the agency implemented mandatory import certification for shrimp from specific Indonesian regions.
Kennedy's exchange with Rollins was a progress check – and the progress is real but incomplete.
Trump built the enforcement framework. Kennedy wants to know whether it is actually running, and whether American shrimpers in the Gulf are finally getting a fair shot against foreign producers who ignore every safety standard Washington imposes on its own.
The Taco Bell outbreak answers that question. The inspection system is still failing. Kennedy is still the only one in the room asking why.
- John Kennedy, Senate floor remarks on imported shrimp, U.S. Senate, September 2025.
- Kennedy, Cassidy letter to major grocery chains on imported radioactive shrimp, U.S. Senate press release, November 7, 2025.
- Kennedy letter to HHS on unsafe foreign shrimp imports, U.S. Senate press release, June 2025.
- "Secretary Rollins Announces the Creation of the USDA Office of Seafood," USDA press release, April 15, 2026.
- "FDA Response to Imported Foods Potentially Contaminated with Cesium-137," U.S. Food and Drug Administration, 2025.
- "2025 Recalls of Frozen Shrimp Products Associated with Cesium-137 Contamination," U.S. Food and Drug Administration, 2025.
- "US FDA Places Imported Shrimp on Its List of 2026 Priorities," SeafoodSource, February 2, 2026.