ICE Collected Nearly 1 Million People’s DNA Last Year—Including Young Children

Summary

Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has dramatically expanded its DNA collection from individuals in civil immigration custody, potentially adding around 920,000 profiles to the FBI's CODIS database in 2025. The vast majority of these individuals have no criminal convictions, yet their genetic information is now stored indefinitely and can be compared against evidence from unsolved crimes. This expansion has drawn criticism and congressional scrutiny, particularly concerning the collection of DNA from children.

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CommentLoaderSave StorySave this storyCommentLoaderSave StorySave this storyOn March 13, 2025, Hugo Moreno-Mendez arrived at the McLennan County Probation Department in Waco, Texas, expecting a routine probation check-in. Instead, Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers were waiting to arrest him.According to a criminal complaint reviewed by WIRED, officers drove Moreno-Mendez to a nearby ICE field office. There, one deportation officer after another approached him with the same demand.Open your mouth.One officer tried to take his fingerprints and swab the inside of his cheek for DNA. He refused. Then another tried. Then a third. Each time, Moreno-Mendez refused.Four days later, Moreno-Mendez was charged with failing to register as a noncitizen and refusing to provide DNA while in federal custody—the latter a misdemeanor that, as of 2021, ICE itself said it was unaware had ever been accepted for prosecution.Moreno-Mendez took both counts to trial. On August 18, 2025, a magistrate judge in Waco found him guilty of each and sentenced him to time served.Moreno-Mendez’s case is part of a sweeping expansion of DNA collection from people held for civil immigration violations—a federal campaign that, backed by the threat of prosecution, funnels the genetic profiles of nearly everyone in ICE custody into an FBI database built for criminal investigations. New research from Georgetown Law's Center on Privacy and Technology estimates that the Department of Homeland Security has become the largest single source of new genetic profiles in the nation's criminal DNA system, with ICE alone potentially adding as many as roughly 920,000 profiles in 2025.The vast majority of people in ICE custody have no criminal conviction, and residing in the US undocumented is typically a civil, not criminal, offense. Yet once the DNA profiles of detained people enter the FBI’s Combined DNA Index System, or CODIS, law enforcement agencies across the country can compare them against evidence from unsolved crimes—and against crime-scene DNA collected years or even decades from now. The physical sample, which holds a person's entire genome, sits in a federal laboratory indefinitely.The expansion of DNA collection has extended to families held in immigration detention, sparked lawsuits over the collection of DNA from protesters and others who allege they should never have been subjected to the program, and drawn congressional scrutiny after lawmakers learned that children were being swabbed at a family detention center in Dilley, Texas.“None of the families at Dilley have been convicted of a crime,” US representatives Joaquin Castro, Greg Stanton, and Nanette Barragán said in a joint statement to WIRED. “They do not belong in a database meant for violent criminals, especially children.”In response to questions from WIRED, a DHS spokesperson defended DNA collection as a border-security and identification measure, saying CBP takes samples from people arrested on federal charges and from detained noncitizens who are subject to fingerprinting and not otherwise exempt. Asked about children whose profiles were submitted to CODIS, DHS pointed to a separate DNA-testing program used to verify family relationships. That program is distinct from the collection at the center of WIRED’s reporting. DHS did not address Georgetown’s estimate that ICE may have added hundreds of thousands of profiles to CODIS in 2025.For most of the program's history, migrant DNA collection played out at the border, where Customs and Border Protection swabbed people it took into custody. ICE's own contribution was marginal. Internal training slides obtained by Georgetown through the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) show ICE collected 3,609 DNA samples in fiscal year 2020 and 16,392 more through mid-May of fiscal 2021—roughly 20,000 in all. CBP was operating on a different scale entirely: Agency spreadsheets Georgetown obtained and analyzed show it sent the FBI the DNA of at least 1.36 million people between October 2020 and the end of 2024, more than a dozen times ICE's rate during the same time period.Georgetown's new report suggests the program entered an entirely different phase in 2025. FBI records show the "detainee" index of CODIS—the sub-index where DHS-collected profiles are stored—reached 3,345,692 profiles by December 2025, growing by roughly 995,000 that year alone. That is more than 2,700 people a day, every day, for a year.The FBI does not explicitly disclose which agency submitted which DNA profile. To estimate the split, Georgetown compared the total against CBP records showing the agency sent the DNA of approximately 75,215 people to the FBI in 2025. ICE has refused to release comparable data, rebuffing repeated public records requests. Based on the gap, Georgetown estimates that ICE may be responsible for as many as 919,908 new profiles in a single year.The change tracks a broader shift. According to Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse data cited by Georgetown, CBP once accounted for the majority of immigration detentions. ICE now accounts for roughly 85 percent, CBP for 15. As of July 11 of this year, ICE was holding 65,765 people, up from 60,311 in early April, while arrests climbed toward 1,500 a day, according to Austin Kocher, a research assistant professor at Syracuse University. The largest single group in detention had no criminal history at all.“Fun Facts”US law enforcement’s increased DNA collection traces to a legal and regulatory shift that began more than two decades ago. Congress in 2005 authorized federal agencies to collect DNA from people arrested, charged, convicted, or detained under federal authority. For years, however, Justice Department regulations allowed DHS to exempt many people held in immigration custody when collecting samples would create resource burdens.In 2020, the DOJ eliminated the exemption. That December, ICE issued Directive 10092.1, requiring officers to collect DNA from nearly everyone in its custody.Internal 2021 training materials obtained by Georgetown show just how broadly officers were instructed to interpret the policy. One slide, from a May 2021 refresher course for Enforcement and Removal Operations (ERO) officers, tells them that asylum seekers and refugees who have not adjusted their immigration status are not exempt—“therefore, their DNA must be sampled.” Another instructs officers, in capital letters, to ensure DNA is largely collected after “ANY arrest.”Under a heading reading “FUN FACTS,” a May 2021 ICE presentation counts 69 confirmed CODIS hits from samples that ERO submitted in roughly the preceding six months, matching evidence in cases involving “Sexual Offences, Homicide, Missing Person, Burglary, Larceny, Crimes of Public Order, Property Crimes, Assault and Battery, Stalking/Domestic Violence and a stolen Pinto.” The slide's author appended a note: “Editor's note: you'd care if that was YOUR Pinto!”Got a Tip?Are you a current or former government employee who wants to talk about US immigration enforcement? We’d like to hear from you. Using a nonwork phone or computer, contact the reporter securely on Signal at dmehro.89.Before the 2020 rule change, profiles from people detained under federal authority were a negligible share of the CODIS index that police search against crime-scene evidence. Georgetown estimates they accounted for about 9 percent by 2024. If DHS and the rest of the criminal legal system keep collecting at these rates, the center projects, DHS will have supplied more than a third of that index by 2030—a milestone it had previously estimated wouldn't arrive until 2034.Primary PurposeWhen the Justice Department changed its regulations in 2020, it defended the collection of DNA from immigration detainees in part as an administrative identification measure—akin to taking fingerprints during booking. That distinction mattered. In Maryland v. King, the US Supreme Court upheld warrantless DNA collection from people arres

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