The Trump administration will reportedly begin DNA testing migrants who are detained trying to enter the country illegally, according to the New York Times.
The tests will put hundreds of thousands of detained immigrants into a national criminal database and would be a large expansion of the Department of Homeland Security’s use of technology to enforce the immigration laws that are currently in place.
The current FBI DNA database is generally made up of people who have been arrested, charged, or convicted of major crimes, but this move would allow for more than 40,000 new entries, as there are that many people in detention facilities.
Immigration activists have argued that the idea of testing everyone could infringe on American citizens’ privacy rights in the event they are accidentally detained.
“That kind of mass collection alters the purpose of DNA collection from one of criminal investigation basically to population surveillance, which is basically contrary to our basic notions of a free, trusting, autonomous society,” Vera Eidelman, a staff lawyer with the American Civil Liberties Union’s Speech, Privacy, and Technology Project, told the Times.
The idea has already been implemented on a smaller scale at the southwestern border. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents began using rapid DNA testing this summer in order to identify “fraudulent family units,” however the testing that will be implemented in the coming weeks will be more comprehensive.
