The Trump administration is continuing its ongoing plan to criminalize undocumented migrants—and now, they'll soon have access to more information on those they're detaining than ever before. Officials with the Department of Homeland Security told reporters Wednesday that the White House is planning to soon start collecting DNA samples from those in federal immigration custody, a move that could affect hundreds of thousands of migrants each year.
The new rule will be legal through the DNA Fingerprint Act of 2005, which requires law enforcement agencies to get DNA samples from detainees. Currently, DHS has been operating under exemptions to the law put in place by former Secretaryin 2010, which prevented immigration detainees who weren't facing criminal charges from having their DNA sampled.
While the DHS may get little out of the rule change, it will serve to impact the migrants in federal custody, branding them as “criminals” and gathering private information that could be used against them. The new rule “would, for the first time in this context, treat undocumented immigrants more like criminals in that DNA testing of this type is used only in a pure criminal context,”, a former deputy general counsel at DHS, told BuzzFeed.
As a result, civil liberties groups are already sounding the alarm about the DNA collection, which the Electronic Frontier Foundation notes in a“allow[s] the government to obtain sensitive and private information on a person without any precursor level of suspicion and without showing that the data collected is tied to a specific crime.
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