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ICE Collected Nearly 1 Million People’s DNA Last Year—Including Young Children
Key Excerpts from Article on Website of Wired
Posted: August 17th, 2026
https://www.wired.com/story/ice-dna-collection-fbi-codis/
Officers drove Moreno-Mendez to a nearby ICE field office. There, one deportation officer after another approached him with the same demand. Open your mouth. One officer tried to take his fingerprints and swab the inside of his cheek for DNA. He refused. Then another tried. Then a third. Each time, Moreno-Mendez refused. Four days later, Moreno-Mendez was charged with failing to register as a noncitizen and refusing to provide DNA while in federal custody—the latter a misdemeanor. On August 18, 2025, a magistrate judge in Waco found him guilty of each. Moreno-Mendez’s case is part of a sweeping expansion of DNA collection from people held for civil immigration violations—a federal campaign that, backed by the threat of prosecution, funnels the genetic profiles of nearly everyone in ICE custody into an FBI database built for criminal investigations. New research from Georgetown Law's Center on Privacy and Technology estimates that the Department of Homeland Security has become the largest single source of new genetic profiles in the nation's criminal DNA system, with ICE alone potentially adding as many as roughly 920,000 profiles in 2025. The vast majority of people in ICE custody have no criminal conviction. Yet once the DNA profiles of detained people enter the FBI’s Combined DNA Index System, or CODIS, law enforcement agencies across the country can compare them against evidence from unsolved crimes.
Note: For more along these lines, read our concise summaries of news articles on immigration enforcement corruption and the disappearance of privacy.
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