US immigration authorities collecting DNA information of children in criminal database

[BumRushDaShow]

Source: The Guardian

Sat 31 May 2025 08.00 EDT
Last modified on Sat 31 May 2025 08.02 EDT


US immigration authorities are collecting and uploading the DNA information of migrants, including children, to a national criminal database, according to government documents released earlier this month. The database includes the DNA of people who were either arrested or convicted of a crime, which law enforcement uses when seeking a match for DNA collected at a crime scene. However, most of the people whose DNA has been collected by Customs and Border Patrol (CBP), the agency that published the documents, were not listed as having been accused of any felonies.

Regardless, CBP is now creating a detailed DNA profile on migrants that will be permanently searchable by law enforcement, which amounts to a “massive expansion of genetic surveillance”, one expert said. The DNA information is stored in a database managed by the FBI called the Combined DNA Index System (Codis), which is used across the country by local, state and federal law enforcement to identify suspects of crimes using their DNA data. Wired first reported the practice and the existence of these documents, and estimates there are more than 133,000 migrant teens and children whose DNA has been collected and uploaded to Codis.

One of them was just four years old. “In order to secure our borders, CBP is devoting every resource available to identify who is entering our country. We are not letting human smugglers, child sex traffickers and other criminals enter American communities,” Hilton Beckham, assistant commissioner of public affairs at CBP, told Wired in a statement. “Toward this end, CBP collects DNA samples for submission to the FBI’s Combined DNA Index System … from persons in CBP custody who are arrested on federal criminal charges, and from aliens detained under CBP’s authority who are subject to fingerprinting and not otherwise exempt from the collection requirement.”

Experts at Georgetown University and the Center on Privacy and Technology published a report last week that found that CBP was collecting the DNA of almost every migrant detained, regardless of how long they were detained. The agency has added more than 1.5m DNA profiles to Codis since 2020, a 5,000% increase in just three years, according to the report. It’s a “massive expansion of genetic surveillance and an unjustified invasion of privacy,” according to one of the authors of the report, Emerald Tse.

Read more: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/may/31/cbp-dna-collection-children-immigrants