A four-year-old child’s DNA profile now sits in the FBI’s criminal database, flagged forever as a potential match to crime scenes across America. So does the profile of her mother, her siblings, and hundreds of thousands of other people arrested at the border—the vast majority of whom have never been convicted of any crime.
Internal documents obtained by Wired reveal that Immigration and Customs Enforcement collected nearly one million DNA samples from people in its custody during 2025, adding 920,000 profiles to the FBI’s CODIS (Combined DNA Index System) database in the process. The scale is staggering. In a single year, ICE funneled more genetic data into a permanent federal criminal database than the entire U.S. prison system generates in a typical year.
- The Scale of Collection: ICE added 920,000 DNA profiles to the FBI’s CODIS criminal database in 2025 alone—more than the entire U.S. prison system typically contributes in a year.
- Who Is Affected: The majority of those profiled are civil immigration detainees with no criminal conviction, including children as young as four years old.
- The Permanence Problem: Removal from CODIS is theoretically possible but practically inaccessible for most detainees, who are rarely informed their DNA was entered into the database at all.
- The Database’s Reach: CODIS now contains over 21 million profiles; every addition increases both its investigative power and its statistical probability of producing false-positive matches.
The critical detail: most of these people are not criminals. They are undocumented immigrants, many detained for civil immigration violations alone. Yet their DNA now exists in the same searchable criminal database used to investigate murders, sexual assaults, and violent felonies. Once entered, removal is nearly impossible.
This isn’t a new practice. ICE has been collecting DNA from detainees for years. What changed in 2025 is the velocity. The second Trump administration, which took office in January 2025, accelerated detention operations dramatically. Immigration enforcement actions increased sharply, and with them, the pace of DNA collection at detention facilities, processing centers, and border checkpoints. The internal documents show ICE’s DNA submissions to CODIS jumped significantly compared to prior years, according to reporting from Wired.
How Does the Legal Authority for This Actually Work?
The mechanics are straightforward and troubling. When ICE arrests someone, agents can collect a DNA sample—typically a cheek swab—under the authority of the DNA Fingerprint Act of 2005. That sample gets sent to the FBI’s CODIS database. The legal justification is that CODIS exists to solve crimes. But the practical effect is that civil immigration detainees, people whose only alleged offense is being in the country without authorization, now have their genetic information permanently cross-referenced against every crime scene sample the FBI processes.
Children complicate the ethics further. The documents reviewed by Wired confirm that ICE collected DNA from detainees as young as four years old. Federal law permits DNA collection from anyone arrested, regardless of age. ICE appears to be following that law. But the question of whether a four-year-old should be genetically fingerprinted as a criminal suspect—simply because she was in the custody of a parent detained for immigration violations—sits in an uncomfortable legal and moral void.
• Analysis published in PMC examining the UK national DNA database found that the expansion of forensic DNA databases consistently raises questions about proportionality—specifically, whether retaining profiles from individuals never convicted of serious offenses is justified by investigative benefit.
• Research on biometric data collection and DNA database development highlights that context-specific standards—including laboratory qualification requirements and privacy safeguards—are frequently absent when databases expand rapidly under enforcement pressure.
• A 2022 study on forensic genetic genealogy documents how DNA databases originally designed for criminal identification are increasingly repurposed for investigative uses their architects never anticipated, raising fundamental questions about scope creep and consent.
Why the Cambridge Analytica Parallel Is More Than Rhetorical
The scale matters because it mirrors a pattern we have seen before in the history of mass data collection. During the Cambridge Analytica scandal, the world learned that a political consulting firm had harvested personal data on 87 million people without their knowledge or consent, building psychological profiles used to micro-target voters. The mechanism was different—Facebook data harvesting rather than DNA collection—but the structural logic was identical: collect data at massive scale from people who don’t fully understand what’s happening, categorize them in a permanent database, and use that database for purposes far beyond the original stated justification.
In both cases, consent was minimal, the subjects were largely unaware of the downstream uses, and the data became permanent infrastructure. The infrastructure behind mass data collection follows the same institutional logic whether the raw material is behavioral data or genetic material: once collected at scale, data finds new uses. Cambridge Analytica’s data was originally harvested through a personality quiz app presented as academic research. ICE’s DNA collection is authorized under a 2005 law written before the current scale of immigration enforcement was imaginable. In both cases, the original legal or stated justification became a vessel for something far larger. With ICE and CODIS, the infrastructure is now genetic—and genetic data carries consequences that behavioral data does not. It is immutable, inheritable, and capable of implicating biological relatives who were never detained at all.
What Happens When You Cannot Get Out of the Database?
Removal from CODIS is theoretically possible but practically difficult. A person would need to petition for expungement, a process that varies by jurisdiction and often requires legal representation. Most immigration detainees lack resources for that fight. Many don’t know their DNA was entered into the database in the first place. ICE doesn’t appear to have a standard notification process informing detainees that their genetic information is now part of a permanent federal criminal index.
The implications ripple outward. If you’re detained at the border, your DNA becomes a permanent suspect profile. If you’re later released or deported, that profile remains searchable. If you’re ever arrested again—for any reason—the database flags you. If a crime scene sample matches your profile, you become a suspect, even if you were thousands of miles away when the crime occurred. DNA databases are not perfect; they produce false positives. The larger the database, the higher the probability of accidental matches.
• 920,000 DNA profiles added to CODIS by ICE in 2025 alone, according to internal documents obtained by Wired
• 21 million total profiles now held in CODIS, a database originally designed around convicted offenders
• 4 years old: the youngest age at which ICE has confirmed collecting DNA from detainees under current enforcement practices
• 0: the number of criminal convictions required for a detainee’s DNA to be entered and retained in the federal criminal database
For the 920,000 people added to CODIS in 2025, that risk is now baked into their permanent record. Most will never know it. Some will discover it only if they’re arrested again or if they happen to be near a crime scene and law enforcement decides to run a genetic dragnet.
Is the Current Legal Framework Equipped to Handle This?
The legal framework enabling this is thin. The DNA Fingerprint Act of 2005 was written before the scale of immigration enforcement reached current levels. It permits collection from anyone arrested for a federal crime or certain state crimes. ICE has interpreted civil immigration detention as falling within that authority. Courts have largely upheld this interpretation, though challenges continue. But the law predates modern DNA database infrastructure and doesn’t grapple with the question of whether a civil detainee should remain in a criminal database indefinitely.
The Biden administration had begun restricting ICE’s DNA collection practices, narrowing the scope to serious criminal cases. Those restrictions appear to have been reversed under the current administration. Internal documents suggest ICE is now collecting DNA from nearly all detainees as a matter of routine, not exception. Understanding the legacy of unchecked data collection makes clear that the absence of legislative guardrails at the moment of rapid expansion is precisely when the most durable harms are established—harms that persist long after the political conditions that created them have changed.
Congress has not passed new legislation to address this. Privacy advocates have raised alarms, but the political will to restrict immigration enforcement tools has evaporated. The FBI continues to expand CODIS, which now contains over 21 million profiles. Each new addition increases the database’s power and its potential for misuse.
Who Exposed the Mechanisms That Made This Possible?
Understanding how enforcement agencies normalize mass data collection requires examining the whistleblower tradition that has historically forced these practices into public view. Just as Christopher Wylie’s testimony was essential to revealing how Cambridge Analytica’s data infrastructure actually functioned—information the company would never have disclosed voluntarily—the internal documents underlying the Wired reporting represent the same dynamic: institutional practices that expand quietly, at scale, until a document leak or congressional inquiry forces accountability. The pattern is consistent. Mass data collection programs do not announce their scope. They are revealed.
The question hanging over this is whether genetic data collected from civil immigration detainees should ever have been entered into a criminal database at all. The answer will likely come from courts, not Congress. Several legal challenges are pending. Until then, 920,000 new profiles added in 2025 alone will remain searchable, permanent, and tied to people who were never convicted of anything.
