November 13, 2026 — Late last year, Louisiana Republican John Kennedy stood on the floor of the US Senate to inveigh against the evils of foreign shrimp and space aliens. Kennedy was standing in front of a placard bearing a still photo from the famous scene in Alien where the title creature bursts forth from John Hurt’s chest. The senator told his colleagues (and at least one impressively stone-faced Senate page) that if they didn’t stick to American-caught shrimp from the Gulf of Mexico, they might well suffer a similar fate. “This is what you could end up looking like if you eat some of the raw, frozen shrimp being sent to the United States by other countries,” Kennedy said. “Even if it doesn’t turn you into the alien if you eat this stuff, I guarantee you will grow an extra ear.”
There’s no evidence that imported shrimp has given anyone a new appendage or faced off against Sigourney Weaver, but Kennedy was alluding to a real issue. Early in July 2025, inspectors at the Port of Los Angeles discovered traces of cesium-137, a radioactive isotope, in a shipment of shrimp from a processing plant in Cikande, Indonesia. They halted and, eventually, destroyed the shipment, from importer PT Bahari Makmur Sejati, better known as BMS Foods. Astonishingly, according to records reviewed by Bloomberg Businessweek, US Customs and Border Protection had allowed BMS to continue importing shrimp through other American ports for months afterward, including for several weeks after the first in a series of BMS shrimp recalls issued by the US Food and Drug Administration. By the start of last fall, Customs had reversed course, but by that point, affected shrimp had already made it to store shelves.
Eventually, BMS shrimp were recalled from grocery stores across the country, affecting almost every major retailer in some way. If you noticed an empty display at your local Walmart or Kroger around that time, that’s why. BMS, Indonesia’s largest shrimp exporter, didn’t respond to requests for comment for this article. Customs referred questions to the FDA, which declined to comment beyond the text of its first recall. “All containers and product testing positive or alerting for Cs-137 have been denied entry into the country,” the FDA said in that announcement. Nathan Rickard, a trade lawyer who reviewed the government’s inspection records, describes its conduct as inconsistent and unprecedented. The FDA would be “hard-pressed to explain how they knew that that stuff that came in wasn’t contaminated,” Rickard says. “Nobody ever checked it.”