Under the new policy, Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Border Patrol agents will be able to collect samples from migrants booked into detention and store their data in a federal database, meaning hundreds of thousands of people could see their data kept in U.S. records.
Condemning the move, the House Homeland Security Committee warned that “not only does it criminalize migrants who are fleeing violence and persecution, but it also propagates the abuse of mass surveillance.”
“We should not be collecting the DNA of detained migrants,” the committee said in a Twitter statement on Thursday.
In her own statement, Democratic Rep. Barbara Lee condemned the plan to test the DNA of people “fleeing violence and hardship” as “absolutely disgusting,” before asking Americans not to “look away.”
Fellow Democratic Rep. Scott Peters lamented how “DNA testing, when harnessed for good, could help reunite the thousands of children separated from their parents under the Administration’s cruel policy,” referring to the Trump administration’s family separation policy. “Instead, they plan to use it to add immigrants to a criminal database.”
Calling the planned measure a “scare tactic,” immigration advocacy group Families Belong Together called the bid “extreme and unnecessary.”
“We cannot allow the U.S. government to collect the DNA of migrant families as a scare tactic,” the organization said. “This is an invasion of the privacy of migrants and their family members.”
In a statement published earlier this week, Vera Eidelman, a staff attorney with the ACLU’s Speech, Privacy and Technology Project warned further of the broader implications of “forced DNA collection.”
“Forced DNA collection raises serious privacy and civil liberties concerns and lacks justification, especially when DHS is already using less intrusive identification methods like fingerprinting,” Eidelman said.
“Our DNA not only reveals deeply personal information about us, but also information about our relatives,” she said. “This means the administration’s racist immigration policies will also implicate the rights of family members in other countries and family members here, including American citizens.”
“This kind of mass collection alters the purpose of DNA collection from one of criminal investigation to population surveillance, which is contrary to our basic notions of freedom and autonomy,” Eidelman warned.
Earlier this year, there had also been questions around the Trump administration’s collection of biometric data from migrant children at the U.S.-Mexico border, with the U.S. Customs and Border Protection agency, which oversees Border Patrol, telling Newsweek in April that testing was done on a “case-by-case basis to combat potential human trafficking.”
Included in the biometric data collected were children’s fingerprints, iris scans and photographs.
When asked by Newsweek how long border officials and the DHS planned to keep children’s biometric data on file, CBP responded that no further comment could be made at this time.
CBP spokesperson Rick Pauza told Newsweek in a separate statement that they were “always evaluating whether other tools, such as DNA testing, could further enhance efforts to protect children.”
