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Federal authorities have coerced DNA samples from millions of immigrants and have put them into a national criminal database.

Among other things, it appears that agents were telling people that they were administration Covid tests when they were taking DNA samples:

A new investigation published today by Georgetown University’s Center on Privacy & Technology reveals the Department of Homeland Security has amassed 1.5 million people’s DNA in recent years thanks to a potentially unconstitutional and predatory legal amendment targeting marginalized communities—a 5,000-percent increase compared to its database’s previous two decades of existence. This genetic material is permanently indexed under “offender” profiles and mostly belongs to BIPOC noncitizens, many of them coerced, intimidated, or misled by ICE, FBI, and DHS officials into believing they were taking COVID-19 tests.

The study’s authors believe the situation “extremely risky” for both individuals and the general public “given rapid advances in DNA technology, the lack of strong legal limits on what the government can do with those samples, and increasing political instability in the US.”

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A new investigation published today by Georgetown University’s Center on Privacy & Technology reveals the Department of Homeland Security has amassed 1.5 million people’s DNA in recent years thanks to a potentially unconstitutional and predatory legal amendment targeting marginalized communities—a 5,000-percent increase compared to its database’s previous two decades of existence. This genetic material is permanently indexed under “offender” profiles and mostly belongs to BIPOC noncitizens, many of them coerced, intimidated, or misled by ICE, FBI, and DHS officials into believing they were taking COVID-19 tests.

The study’s authors believe the situation “extremely risky” for both individuals and the general public “given rapid advances in DNA technology, the lack of strong legal limits on what the government can do with those samples, and increasing political instability in the US.”

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The government’s unprecedented expansion into genetic surveillance began during the Trump administration. Building upon the 2005 DNA Fingerprint Act, a 2020 Justice Department policy expansion grants FBI, Department of Homeland Security (DHS), and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officials the authority to gather an individual’s DNA after being “detained” in an immigration context.

“As a practical matter almost nobody is categorically excluded from DNA collection by the requirement that they first be detained,” the Center explains.

Regardless of someone’s guilt or innocence, all samples are entered into the Combined DNA Index System (CODIS) federal database as permanently searchable “offender” profiles available to local, state, federal, and international criminal law enforcement. The program has remained active throughout the Biden administration and there is no indication Congress is considering to re-examine the policy.

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Following an extensive review of available information, the Center on Privacy & Technology concludes these immigration policy exploitations have allowed the DHS to collect DNA mostly from people of color, often noncitizens, at a rate that wouldn’t be possible in traditional criminal policing. If the DHS continues at its projected pace, as much as one-third of all CODIS “offender” profiles by 2034 will come from methods that don’t follow standard police procedural rules for collecting DNA. The investigators also “did not discover a single instance of a person refusing to submit to DNA” in all of their interviews with previously detained individuals. Many people cited fear and intimidation as key factors in agreeing to the DNA swabs.

This is racist, corrupt, and abusive.

Not only should the individuals responsible for this be fired, they should be jailed.