ICE is collecting DNA from detainees for future policing

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**Meghan McCarty Carino** (0:31)
ICE is cracking down on undocumented immigrants and collecting their DNA. From American Public Media, this is Marketplace Tech. I'm Meghan McCarty Carino.
Immigration and Customs Enforcement collected the DNA of nearly a million people last year, according to a new analysis from Georgetown Law's Center on Privacy and Technology. After a policy change during the first Trump administration in 2020, the Department of Homeland Security, which also includes Customs and Border Protection, has been ramping up DNA collection of detainees and sending that genetic material to the FBI. Stevie Glaberson is here to discuss. She's the Director of Advocacy at Georgetown Law's Center on Privacy and Technology and a co-author of the report.

**Stevie Glaberson** (1:29)
In the last couple of years, since basically a rule change that happened in the first Trump administration, DHS has now started acting sort of as this massive DNA collector for the federal government. Basically, anyone the agency, I'm using air quotes here, detains, which sort of means anyone the agency decides that it wants to stop or hold for any amount of time, line agents decide whether to take those people's DNA. So once they take the DNA, they send it to the FBI for the creation of a profile. And then that profile is added to what's called CODIS, our country's criminal policing database. And it's held in an index we understand sort of forever at this moment.
As far as we can tell, there's no process to like regularly go through and remove it. So it is there.

**Meghan McCarty Carino** (2:25)
And as you note, the Department of Homeland Security is now the primary contributor to this DNA database. How significant of an increase are we talking about?

**Stevie Glaberson** (2:35)
Before 2020, before sort of everything changed, DHS was adding minuscule amounts of people's DNA to this same database. Over about 25 years since this database, since CODIS has existed, something like 28 million people's profiles have been added, almost exclusively by criminal policing authorities at all levels. But DHS in the last couple of years has massively ramped up its DNA collection activities and now is adding millions of people's DNA. And in just a couple of years, we've seen them add 3.3 million people's DNA to CODIS. And we've done an analysis of sort of like the pace at which they're doing so and what it means. And before all of this started in about 2020, DHS contributed profiles or profiles from people quote unquote detained by the federal government made up far less than 1% of this database, 0.21%.
They're on track now to make up fully a third of the database by 2030

**Meghan McCarty Carino** (3:50)
We'll be right back.

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**Meghan McCarty Carino** (5:23)
You're listening to Marketplace Tech. I'm Meghan McCarty Carino. We're back with Stevie Glaberson at Georgetown Law's Center on Privacy and Technology.
Tell us more about what this can actually be used for.

**Stevie Glaberson** (5:35)
Yeah. The database into which this DNA is loaded is searched against for criminal investigations. What that means is that people who were not arrested on criminal suspicion, whose DNA was not taken because there's any suspicion that they actually did or will commit a crime, and who were afforded none of the protections that are supposed to exist when the government takes our most sensitive information, is in a government database for the police of all stripes, from federal policing agencies all the way down to search against in criminal policing investigations going forward. It basically puts these folks and by association, their biological relatives in a perpetual genetic lineup.