The Trump administration has outlined plans to start taking DNA from hundreds of thousands of people in immigration detention. The DNA profiles, which would be taken without consent, would be funneled into the FBI’s genetic database, called the Combined DNA Index System (CODIS), which law enforcement agencies typically use to investigate crimes. 

The government estimates that, at current levels, requiring DNA samples from everyone in immigration detention would add 748,000 profiles to CODIS each year. That’s more profiles per year than the entire state of New York has contributed to CODIS in more than 20 years. And, because DNA exposes sensitive information about family members, this collection would also implicate the relatives of those in detention, including U.S. citizens and relatives who haven’t even been born. The DNA samples themselves would be stored indefinitely by forensic laboratories.

In effect, the government is taking a big step toward a mass database for full population surveillance. And it is achieving this by miscasting the hundreds of thousands of children and adults in immigration detention as threats to the country’s security.

This should have alarm bells ringing everywhere.

Losing control of their lives and DNA

Already, many people in immigration detention wear barcodes around their necks and wrists. They have no control over their movements, their health or their futures. If the government begins collecting their DNA, they will also lose control over their genetic blueprints, which can reveal our family relationships, our ancestry, and our propensity for certain medical conditions. As technology develops, our DNA will likely claim to reveal even more, from sexual orientation to susceptibility to addiction.

While the government currently does not use CODIS to mine our DNA for all of this information, history has shown that the government often deploys new surveillance technologies against vulnerable and over-policed communities first in an attempt to normalize their use. It often initially imposes limits on its use or collection of information, but those limits fall away over time — as they are now.

In just the last decade, Customs and Border Protection drones have been used well beyond their initial purpose of security enforcement at the border. Similarly, border officers now conduct warrantless searches of our cellphones and laptops — a practice the ACLU and Electronic Frontier Foundation are challenging in court — for reasons outside their mandate of immigration and customs enforcement. And cellphone trackers, commonly known as “Stingrays,” were first used as a counter-intelligence and military technique, but law enforcement officers, including local police, now use them in routine investigations.

What if the government were to expand its collection and use of our genetic information in similar ways?

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Imagine the consequences if the government started demanding that every traveler — including business visitors and tourists — provide a DNA sample for its criminal database. Or that each of us submit DNA for the database along with our tax returns, or at birth. The government would likely argue that such expansions would help solve crimes, as it is doing now. But such expansions would also mean that each person forced to contribute DNA would live life as a suspect rather than as a member of a society built on freedom, autonomy, and trust.

Threat to privacy and civil liberties

What if, in the future, the government were to use the genetic information it collects to try to bar individuals from entering the country based on their propensity for certain medical conditions? Or to track our every movement using the DNA we involuntarily leave behind every time we drink from a cup or blow our noses?

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This isn’t just far-fetched paranoia. The Trump administration has proposed a “public charge” rule that would dramatically restrict who is eligible to settle in the United States based on their likelihood to need certain forms of assistance. Local law enforcement officers have already tried to track anti-pipeline protesters by swabbing cigarette butts left behind at protest sites. Time and again, our government has engaged in wrongful behavior towards people based on their actual or perceived genetic composition — from forcing sterilizations to prohibiting marriages to refusing to allow healthy individuals to engage in Air Force training.

Forced DNA collection presents a significant threat to our privacy rights and civil liberties. If we normalize it, we open ourselves up to a scary world — one in which we are no longer members of a free society, but rather bodies to be tracked and not trusted.

We must all make our opposition to this dangerous, dehumanizing proposal clear. At the same time, Congress should at a minimum prevent any taxpayer funds from being used for this forced DNA collection.

Vera Eidelman is a staff attorney with the ACLU’s Speech, Privacy, and Technology Project.