Trump administration plans to begin taking DNA from detained migrants to track them in a national criminal database.
The new policy would enable Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Border Patrol to collect samples from those booked into immigrant detention, Homeland Security officials said Wednesday. The move could target hundreds of thousands of migrants and is likely to prompt a backlash from civil liberty organizations that say collecting genetic data collection should be limited to dangerous criminals.
Crossing the southern border without authorization is illegal, but most of those instances don't get prosecuted. Further planning from the agency will determine the full scale of the collection process. More than 900,000 unauthorized migrants crossed the border in the past year and more than 40,000 people currently reside ICE detention.
In a rare statement of support, the U.S. Special Counsel, a federal accountability office, said the decision to start tracking DNA puts Homeland Security back on track with a 2005 DNA collection law. In 2010, the Obama administration exempted people booked into immigration detention from the law because Secretary Janet Napolitano said Homeland Security didn't have the resources to collect the DNA.
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