Immigration and Customs Enforcement added nearly 920,000 DNA profiles to the FBI’s national criminal database in 2025, according to research from Georgetown Law’s Center on Privacy and Technology, marking a dramatic expansion of United States immigration and customs enforcement’s role in genetic surveillance. The figure, based on FBI records showing that the detainee index of CODIS grew by roughly 995,000 profiles that year, equates to more than 2,700 new profiles submitted every day for an entire year.
The vast majority of people whose DNA was collected have no criminal conviction. Most are detained under civil immigration authority, and residing in the US undocumented is typically a civil, not criminal, offense. Yet once profiles enter the FBI’s Combined DNA Index System—the national database law enforcement agencies search against evidence from unsolved crimes—they can be compared against crime-scene DNA collected years or even decades into the future.
The expansion traces to a legal shift that began in 2020. In October 2019, the Trump administration proposed eliminating a regulatory exemption that had allowed the Department of Homeland Security to exclude many immigration detainees from mandatory DNA collection due to resource constraints. The Justice Department finalized the rule in March 2020, and in December 2020, ICE issued Directive 10092.1, requiring officers to collect DNA from nearly everyone in its custody.
Internal ICE training materials obtained by Georgetown show how broadly officers were instructed to interpret the policy. One May 2021 slide told Enforcement and Removal Operations officers that asylum seekers and refugees who have not adjusted their immigration status are not exempt—”therefore, their DNA must be sampled.” Another instructed officers in capital letters to ensure DNA is collected after “ANY arrest.” Prior to this shift, ICE collected only 3,609 DNA samples in fiscal 2020 and 16,392 through mid-May 2021, roughly 20,000 in total.
In January 2025, President Trump’s “Securing Our Borders” executive order directed the attorney general and homeland security secretary to take “all appropriate action” to fulfill DNA collection requirements for all aliens detained under federal authority, accelerating the program further. The FBI’s fiscal 2027 budget request seeks $23.4 million and 45 new positions to expand federal DNA databasing operations, citing submissions that reached more than 180,000 per month during February 2024.
The collection has extended to families and children in immigration detention. During a May 2026 inspection of the Dilley Immigration Processing Center in South Texas, members of Congress learned that ICE had been collecting DNA from detained families for the previous three months. CBP records analyzed by Georgetown identify 492 children under 14 whose DNA was sent to the FBI between January 2025 and January 2026—including 33 seven-year-olds, 32 six-year-olds, 21 five-year-olds, and a 4-year-old Mexican child processed in El Paso in January 2026.
ICE has also begun prosecuting people who refuse to provide DNA samples. WIRED identified two prosecutions filed in 2025 against people in immigration custody for refusing collection. In one case, a man named Ronald Genao-Diaz at the airport in Carolina, Puerto Rico, refused DNA collection on at least five separate occasions, covering his mouth with a disposable mask to prevent officers from swabbing him. He was charged with refusal and document fraud, pleaded guilty after a judge found probable cause, and was sentenced to time served and a fine.
An internal ICE email from March 2025 complicates the government’s longstanding description of DNA collection as an identification measure. An ICE attorney wrote that the authority’s “primary purpose” is the construction of a national DNA database for solving crimes rather than family verification. That characterization goes directly to the constitutional dispute surrounding the program. The Supreme Court’s 2013 decision in Maryland v. King upheld warrantless DNA collection from people arrested for serious crimes partly because the state said the swabs served a booking and identification function—yet immigration detention often involves no criminal accusation, and the resulting profile is retained for future criminal searches.
Representatives Joaquin Castro, Greg Stanton, and Nanette Barragán issued a joint statement to WIRED opposing the collection from detained families at Dilley: “None of the families at Dilley have been convicted of a crime. They do not belong in a database meant for violent criminals, especially children.” DHS has defended DNA collection as a border-security and identification measure, but did not address Georgetown’s estimate that ICE may be responsible for nearly 920,000 new profiles in 2025.
If DHS and criminal justice agencies continue collecting at 2025 rates, Georgetown projects that profiles supplied through DHS detention authority could constitute more than one-third of the FBI’s searchable offender index by 2030—a milestone the center had previously estimated would not arrive until 2034. The CODIS detainee index contained more than 3.34 million profiles by December 2025, up from just over 23,000 in 2016, and now accounts for more than 17 percent of the broader offender index against which police search crime-scene evidence.
Sources
- WIRED — ICE DNA collection expansion in 2025, Georgetown Law research, internal ICE documents and training materials, prosecutions for DNA refusal, ICE attorney email on program purpose, family detention at Dilley, children’s DNA collection
- Biometric Update — Georgetown Law estimate of 920,000 ICE DNA profiles in 2025, CODIS growth figures, historical collection rates, CBP data, FBI budget requests and processing capacity
- The New Republic — ICE DNA database expansion, Georgetown Law report, children’s DNA collection, family detention details, prosecutions for refusal
- Georgetown Law Center on Privacy and Technology — Research report “Raiding the Genome,” CODIS statistics, policy background, projections for future database composition
