ICE Collected Nearly 1M People's DNA Last Year-Including Young Children

New research from Georgetown Law's Center on Privacy and Technology estimates that Immigration and Customs Enforcement collected DNA from nearly 1 million people in 2025, making the Department of Homeland Security the largest single source of new genetic profiles in the FBI's criminal database. The center said ICE potentially added as many as roughly 920,000 profiles to the Combined DNA Index System last year. The vast majority of people in ICE custody have no criminal conviction, and residing in the U.S. without documentation is typically a civil offense. Once profiles enter CODIS, law enforcement agencies nationwide can compare them against evidence from unsolved crimes. The physical samples are held indefinitely in federal laboratories. The expansion has extended to families in immigration detention, including children at a family detention center in Dilley, Texas. U.S. Representatives Joaquin Castro, Greg Stanton, and Nanette Barragán said in a joint statement that none of the families at Dilley have been convicted of a crime and do not belong in a database meant for violent criminals, especially children. A DHS spokesperson defended DNA collection as a border-security and identification measure but did not address Georgetown's estimate. Internal training slides obtained through the Freedom of Information Act show ICE collected roughly 20,000 DNA samples in fiscal year 2020 and through mid-May 2021. FBI records show the detainee index of CODIS reached 3,345,692 profiles by December 2025, growing by roughly 995,000 that year alone.