Photo by CDC on Unsplash

That title seems like something taken from a spy movie, but the reality is just as scary. 

For the past four years, the U.S. government has been operating under a Trump-era Department of Justice rule that was left in place by the Biden Administration. Since 2020, that rule has given DHS (Department of Homeland Security) the ability to collect DNA samples from any immigrant who is “detained”, which in four years amounts to the DNA of more than 1.5 million people.

The average person usually associates the word “detained” with someone who is in prison or who is in a detention center near the U.S. border, but DNA collection has been performed on people driving through border checkpoints or questioned at airport customs. 

While the DNA collection is a scary thought, a report released by the Georgetown Law Center for Privacy and Technology paints the full picture of the DNA collection, which is even more worrisome: After DHS collects the DNA samples from detainees, the samples are sent to the FBI (Federal Bureau of Investigation), who then creates profiles from the samples and adds them to CODIS, the nation's criminal policing DNA database. Once there, the DNA samples can be stored indefinitely, and are accessible to police at the local, state, federal, and international levels for use in criminal investigations.

One of the authors of the report interviewed many people who did not even know that their DNA had been taken, or thought that their cheeks were being swabbed to test for illness. It is very apparent, through the interviews conducted by the Georgetown Report, that those receiving DNA swabs did not receive sufficient notice about the DNA collection. 

Can the Government Get My DNA?

In general your DNA should only be used for the purposes for which you gave consent for, but technology is increasing at a rate that is difficult for the law to keep up with, and who is exempt from general DNA policies is not always clear. However, many legal practitioners and policy writers argue that the government's DNA collection of immigrants is a violation of the U.S. Constitution's Fourth Amendment, which is supposed to protect people from unreasonable searches and seizures. Whether that will be applied to DHS searches at the border though is yet to be seen. 

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