Over the last couple of years, ICE has dramatically expanded its DNA collection practices, rapidly adding to the FBI’s genetic database built to solve criminal investigations. ICE potentially added roughly 920,000 genetic profiles to this database in 2025 alone. Despite the fact that this DNA is being collected from people held for civil immigration violations, not criminal ones, this genetic material can now be left in a lab indefinitely to be used by law enforcement to prosecute folks in the future. Over the course of 2025, CBP even sent the DNA of 493 children under the age of 14 to the FBI’s criminal database — despite rules instructing officers not to collect DNA from children that young.

Even more frighteningly, some people are now being prosecuted for refusing DNA collection. Although ICE officers have been trained to warn people that refusing collection is a federal crime for years, a 2021 presentation revealed that the agency was at that point unaware of a single such case accepted for prosecution. This expansion of the FBI’s genetic database, DHS’s lack of transparency about usage, noncompliance with age restrictions, and prosecution of those refusing to hand over their genetic information are all cause for concern, if an unsurprising development.

(Taken from an email sent to me by Never Again Action.)