ICE Collected Nearly 1 Million People’s DNA Last Year—Including Young Children
Internal documents show ICE's DNA collection has skyrocketed in the second Trump administration. Now hundreds of thousands of people never convicted of a crime are in an FBI criminal database forever.
The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has been collecting DNA samples from nearly all individuals held in federal immigration custody, according to a recent investigation. This practice has resulted in ICE potentially adding up to 920,000 genetic profiles in 2025 to the FBI's Combined DNA Index System (CODIS), which is primarily used for criminal investigations.
While the majority of people in ICE custody have no criminal convictions and the immigration status of being undocumented is typically a civil offense, their DNA profiles are now part of a system meant for violent criminals.
Law enforcement agencies across the country can now compare these DNA profiles against evidence from unsolved crimes, as well as potential future crime-scene DNA. This widespread collection has extended to families held in immigration detention, leading to legal challenges and congressional scrutiny. The collection of DNA from children has drawn particular attention, with some advocating that it should not be used in a database meant for violent offenses.
Initially, DNA collection primarily occurred at the border, where Customs and Border Protection (CBP) took samples from individuals taken into custody. However, ICE's involvement has grown significantly. A 2021 training slide obtained by Georgetown Law's Center on Privacy and Technology revealed that ICE collected 16,392 DNA samples through mid-May of fiscal 2021, bringing the total number of samples collected by ICE to approximately 20,000.
In contrast, CBP sent the FBI the DNA of at least 1.36 million people between October 2020 and the end of 2024, more than a dozen times ICE's rate during that same period.
In 2025, the FBI's detainee index within CODIS reached 3,345,692 profiles, marking a substantial increase of roughly 995,000 profiles that year alone. This represents an average of more than 2,700 people per day, every day, for a year. Despite DHS's claim that this DNA collection is a border-security and identification measure, the majority of DNA samples collected are from individuals in immigration custody, many of whom have no criminal convictions.
The expansion of this practice has raised concerns about the implications for privacy and civil liberties.
Written by urgent.news from Wired's reporting — not their text. Machine-written — may contain errors; check the original before relying on it.
