The Trump administration turned to DNA technology to help find and stop immigrants, including children, but immigration defenders say it was slow to explain how it uses and oversees genetic information.
Three groups continued the Ministry of Internal Security Monday after trying to obtain recordings on the data collection program since last summer, during the Biden administration.
The complainants are the Georgetown Law Center on privacy and technology, which is part of the law faculty of the University of Georgetown which focuses on the law and policy of privacy and surveillance; The Amica Center for Immigrant Rights and Americans for Immigrant Justice, two groups of immigrant rights.
The groups describe in their trial of their round trips with the DHS, immigration and customs application and customs and border protection, because they initially asked for information on their DNA collection of non-citizens on August 1, 2024.
Since 2020, DHS has expanded its DNA collection program and has increased DNA contributions to the FBI database, CODIS, by 5,000%, becoming the largest contributor, according to the Georgetown Center. The FBI DNA database is accessible by the police across the country to investigate criminal, the complainants said in a press release.
Stevie Glaberson, director of research and advocacy at the Georgetown Center, said in a statement that DHS is expanding its database by “collecting DNA with people accused of uncrimation and while operating with any of the constraints that are supposed to be in place before the government does not oblige someone to give its most sensitive personal information”.
He said the Americans deserve more visibility on the program and said that DHS’s lack of transparency was unacceptable.
The DHS did not immediately respond to a request for comments.
Daniel Melo, senior lawyer for the Immica immigration impact laboratory, told NBC News that previous administrations had also collected DNA. A 2005 law with federal agencies forced to collect the DNA of people in detention, including non-citizens.
Before 2020, the Ministry of Justice had declared to DHS that its application of immigration and its border agents did not have to regularly collect the DNA of all the non-citizens he had detained, said Melo. The Biden administration has adopted rules requiring full compliance with the 2005 law, but the reporters and a government guard dog complained about compliance.
The decree “secure our borders” signed by President Donald Trump requires that the Attorney General and the DHS meet the requirements of the DNA collection of non-citizens mandated in the 2005 law.
“Brows information about everyone”
Confidentiality and civil rights groups have long have problems with the government’s DNA collection program. Melo said the public should worry about whether people are informed of their rights and how information is collected and used.
“This information could temporarily be used in all kinds of ways of mapping complete communities, to build essentially a more complex surveillance network around non -citizen communities,” said Melo.
He said that if the DHS could continue to collect the DNA of non-citizens, “experiment” on them “, then they are able to refine these technologies and deploy them in a new and interesting way and probably really dangerous and frightening for the rest of us.”
Emily Tucker, executive director of the Georgetown Center, said in a statement that “it is a mistake to consider the DHS DNA collection program as” the application of immigration “.”
“Trump uses immigration powers to justify the activities of his militarized federal police forces because there is so little institutional or judicial surveillance or responsibility for the actions to apply executives who invoke the immigration authority,” she said in a statement. “This program is part of a massive surveillance slide that sweeps information from everyone. They will use it for expulsion, but they will also use it to intimidate, silence and target anyone they perceive as the enemy.”
