DHS Faces New Pressure Over DNA Taken From Immigrant Children

WIRED

16-07-2025

Jul 16, 2025 1:30 PM The US government has added the DNA of approximately 133,000 migrant children and teens to a criminal database, which critics say could mean police treat them like suspects 'indefinitely.' U.S. Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem takes part in the Hill Nation Summit, co-hosted by The Hill and NewsNation, at the Willard Hotel on July 16, 2025, in Washington, DC. Photograph:United States Senator Ron Wyden is pressing the United States departments of Homeland Security and Justice to explain how and why they are collecting DNA from immigrants, including children, on a massive scale.
Wyden confronted the agencies with demands this week to explain the scope, legality, and oversight of the government's DNA collection. In letters to DOJ and DHS, the Oregon Democrat also criticized what he described as a 'chilling expansion' of a sprawling and opaque system, accusing Trump administration officials of withholding even basic facts about its operation.
Citing recent data that shows DHS took genetic samples from approximately 133,000 migrant children and teenagers—first reported by WIRED in May and made public through a Freedom of Information Act request filed by Georgetown Law—Wyden says the government has provided no 'justification for the permanent collection of the children's DNA samples.'
Their DNA profiles now reside in CODIS, an FBI database historically used to identify suspects in violent crimes. Critics argue the system—which retains information indefinitely by default—was never intended to hold genetic data from civil immigration detainees, especially minors.
In the last four years, DHS has collected DNA from tens of thousands of minors, among them at least 227 children aged 13 or younger, government data shows. The vast majority of those profiled—more than 70 percent—were citizens of just four countries: Mexico, Venezuela, Cuba, and Haiti.
'By including these children's DNA in CODIS, their profiles will be queried every time a search is done of the database,' Wyden writes. 'These children will be treated by law enforcement as suspects for every investigation of every future crime, indefinitely.'
The US government has been steadily positioning noncitizens at the forefront of a massive genetic surveillance regime for years, collecting DNA almost entirely from immigrants in civil custody, while feeding it into systems built for mostly criminal tracking.
Recent analysis by the Georgetown Law Center on Privacy and Technology reveals that more than a quarter million DNA samples have been processed and added to CODIS over the past four months alone, accelerating the crime-fighting tool's transformation into a warehouse for migrant DNA.
Wyden has asked attorney general Pam Bondi and Homeland Security secretary Kristi Noem to release details on how, and under what legal authority, the DNA samples are gathered, stored, and used. He further pressed for data on the number of samples collected, especially from minors, and asked the officials to list by what policies DHS currently governs the coercion, expungement, and sharing of DNA data.
'When Congress authorized the laws surrounding DNA collection by the federal government over two decades ago, lawmakers sought to address violent crime,' Wyden says. 'It was not intended as a means for the federal government to collect and permanently retain the DNA of all noncitizens.'
Natalie Baldassarre, a spokesperson for the DOJ, acknowledged the agency had received Wyden's inquiry but declined to comment further. DHS did not respond to a request for comment about its practice of harvesting children's DNA.
The Center on Privacy and Technology, which investigates emerging surveillance technologies and their impacts on civil liberties, contends the agency's aggressive DNA collection is only one node in a broader effort to redefine policing through vast use of biometric and behavioral data. In a 2024 report, it argued that genetic surveillance has 'almost no use in immigration enforcement operations as they currently function,' suggesting the practice is a stalking horse for normalizing the use of genetic profiling across everyday police work.
Constitutional law expert David Cole flagged this mission creep in the wake of the US government's post-9/11 abuses, writing: 'Measures initially targeted at noncitizens may well come back to haunt us all.' Surveillance scholars have also widely observed that new technologies—especially those with invasive potential—are often deployed against vulnerable groups before being normalized across society.
Immigrants, under this regime, are more frequently targeted for biometric data collection because they are mostly powerless politically, unable to resist being cast as test subjects in surveillance programs that, once embedded, rarely retain their original scope.
'The surveillance the federal government experiments with on immigrants today will inevitably be deployed against citizens tomorrow,' says Anthony Enriquez, vice president of advocacy at Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights.
'The federal government's project of mass DNA collection and genetic surveillance of immigrants has already begun to sweep up US citizens,' he says. 'It's a shorter road than ever from surveillance to criminalization to a detention center in rural Louisiana or a mega-prison in El Salvador.'