ICE Collected Nearly 1M People's DNA Last Year–Including Young Children

In 2025, ICE collected nearly 1 million people's DNA, including young children, as part of a federal campaign to expand DNA collection from individuals held for civil immigration violations. This DNA collection is stored in the FBI's Combined DNA Index System (CODIS), a database primarily used for criminal investigations. The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has become the largest source of new genetic profiles in the nation's criminal DNA system, potentially adding up to 920,000 profiles in 2025 alone.

The vast majority of people in ICE custody have no criminal conviction, as undocumented status in the US is typically a civil, not criminal, offense. However, once their DNA profiles enter CODIS, law enforcement agencies nationwide can compare them against unsolved crimes and future crime scene DNA. This practice has sparked lawsuits and drawn congressional scrutiny, as families held in immigration detention have not been convicted of crimes.

DHS defended DNA collection as a border-security and identification measure, noting that samples are taken from people arrested on federal charges and detained noncitizens subject to fingerprinting. However, the expansion of DNA collection has extended to families held in immigration detention, and children have been swabbed at family detention centers.

In 2025, ICE may have added hundreds of thousands of profiles to CODIS, according to Georgetown Law's Center on Privacy and Technology's estimate.