Millions of People’s Data Collected for Massive Genetic Policing Database

The federal government has built one of the largest DNA collection programs in American history, and it started at the border.

Story Snapshot

The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) began collecting DNA from people in immigration custody starting January 2020, lowering the age for collection from 18 to 14.
Georgetown Law’s Center on Privacy and Technology says Customs and Border Protection (CBP) has become the top contributor of DNA samples to the national criminal database.
Researchers found CBP collected DNA samples from more than 2,000 U.S. citizens, including minors, between 2020 and 2024.
A 2021 DHS Inspector General report found agencies did not consistently follow their own DNA collection rules and lacked real oversight.

How the Program Started and Grew

DHS formally rolled out its DNA collection program at the border in January 2020, under a Privacy Impact Assessment covering both CBP and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). That same year, DHS reissued the assessment to say it was lowering the minimum collection age from 18 to 14. Three members of Congress raised alarms almost immediately, noting DHS started swabbing teenagers in Detroit and Eagle Pass, Texas within days of launch.

The Justice Department gave this expansion legal teeth. A final rule, effective April 2020, used authority from the 2005 DNA Fingerprint Act to direct DHS to collect DNA from immigration detainees on a much wider scale. That rule removed an earlier exemption that had let DHS skip collection when it was too costly or difficult to carry out. The result was a much broader net, catching far more people than before.

Citizens Caught in the Sweep

Georgetown Law’s Center on Privacy and Technology dug into records CBP released under a public records request and found something troubling. The agency had knowingly taken DNA from American citizens on a regular basis, collecting more than 2,000 samples from citizens, some of them children, between 2020 and 2024. That is a program built for foreign nationals in custody, quietly pulling in the genetic information of people it has no legal reason to hold.

Georgetown’s broader research paints an even bigger picture. The group’s report on the program describes CBP collecting DNA from over a million people between late 2020 and the end of 2024, with samples flowing directly into the FBI’s national criminal database used by police nationwide. Once a profile lands in that system, it can stay there for the rest of a person’s life, searchable in future criminal investigations that have nothing to do with immigration.

The Legal Foundation Behind the Collection

DHS has not hidden behind vague authority. The agency states plainly that CBP and ICE, as federal law enforcement agencies, are statutorily required to collect DNA from certain people in their custody. That claim rests on real law: the DNA Fingerprint Act of 2005 lets the Attorney General direct DHS to gather DNA from non-citizens detained under federal authority. In plain terms, Congress opened this door two decades ago, and the 2020 rule simply walked further through it.

That legal foundation matters. It means critics cannot fairly call this program a rogue operation invented out of thin air. The real fight is over scope. Was the rule ever meant to sweep in American teenagers at a Michigan border checkpoint, or U.S. citizens caught up in secondary screening? The statute authorized DNA collection from detained non-citizens, not from citizens who happen to get flagged along the way.

Oversight Gaps and What Comes Next

Even the government’s own watchdog found problems. A 2021 DHS Inspector General report determined that law enforcement components inside the department did not consistently collect DNA as required, and that DHS failed to properly oversee how the program was carried out. Only the Secret Service followed the rules consistently. ICE and CBP either collected inconsistently or, in CBP’s case at the time, not at all. That is not the record of a tightly managed federal system.

None of this means the program lacks legal footing, and it does not mean every claim about a “3.3 million person database” has been independently verified sample by sample. But the documented facts already on the table are serious enough: teenagers swabbed at the border, American citizens caught in a system built for detainees, and a federal watchdog admitting the whole thing ran without proper oversight. Congress and the courts, not press releases, should settle how far this goes.