Americans’ DNA Scooped At Border

Federal agents have been swabbing cheeks at the border since 2020, and the DNA collected now sits inside the same national database used to solve murders and rapes.

Story Snapshot

The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) formally expanded DNA collection at the border in 2020, lowering the minimum age from 18 to 14.
Georgetown Law’s Center on Privacy and Technology found over 2,000 DNA samples taken from U.S. citizens between 2020 and 2024.
A DHS Inspector General report found agencies did not consistently follow their own DNA collection rules and lacked adequate oversight.
The program runs on legal authority granted through the DNA Fingerprint Act of 2005 and a 2020 Department of Justice (DOJ) rule.

What DHS Actually Built at the Border

Starting in January 2020, DHS began collecting DNA samples from people in Border Patrol custody, including teenagers as young as 14. The agency’s own Privacy Impact Assessment confirms it lowered the age threshold from 18, and officials describe Customs and Border Protection (CBP) and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) as “statutorily mandated” to take DNA from certain people they detain. This was not a quiet pilot program. It was a deliberate, documented policy change.

Three House members, Debbie Dingell, Veronica Escobar, and Rashida Tlaib, raised alarms almost immediately. Their letter noted DHS started collecting samples from teens at a Border Patrol sector in Detroit and a port of entry in Eagle Pass, Texas, within days of the policy taking effect. Lawmakers questioning a federal agency’s treatment of minors is not a small procedural footnote. It is the kind of red flag that should have triggered hearings, not just a letter.

The legal foundation traces back to the DNA Fingerprint Act of 2005, which let the Attorney General order DHS to collect DNA from non-citizens in federal custody. The Department of Justice made that authority formal with a rule effective April 2020, closing a prior exemption that had let DHS skip collection when it was inconvenient. Supporters can rightly say this program was built through actual rulemaking, not invented on the fly by rogue agents.

The Part That Should Worry Every American

Georgetown Law’s Center on Privacy and Technology dug into records CBP released under a Freedom of Information Act request. Their finding: CBP knowingly collected DNA from American citizens on a regular basis, with more than 2,000 citizen samples taken between 2020 and 2024. These are not undocumented migrants. These are Americans whose genetic code now sits in a law enforcement database because they crossed paths with a border checkpoint.

Georgetown’s broader research describes DHS becoming a major contributor of DNA samples to the national criminal database system, with collection numbers reported in the hundreds of thousands to over a million samples in recent years. The specific “3.3 million” figure attached to this story in some headlines does not appear directly in the government documents or Georgetown’s own published findings reviewed here. That gap matters, and readers deserve the honest caveat even as the underlying collection program itself is fully documented and real.

A 2021 DHS Inspector General report adds a different kind of concern. It found DHS law enforcement components did not consistently collect DNA as required, and that CBP and the Transportation Security Administration collected no DNA at all during the review period, while DHS failed to adequately oversee whether its own rules were followed. So the story is not just “DHS collects too much.” It is also “DHS cannot even manage the program it built,” which is its own kind of failure.

Why This Cuts Against Big Government, Not Just Big Databases

Conservatives have long argued that government power, once created, rarely stays inside its original lines. This program is a textbook example. It began as an immigration enforcement tool aimed at non-citizens and has since swept in American citizens, including minors, without their consent and seemingly without a robust system to track who gets flagged or why. A tool built for the border should not quietly become a permanent fixture of domestic policing against citizens who did nothing wrong.

None of this means DHS lacks legal authority to act. The DOJ rule and the DNA Fingerprint Act give the agency real legal footing, and border security absolutely justifies stronger identity verification tools. But legal authority is not the same as good oversight, and a program that cannot reliably separate citizens from non-citizens, or explain why a 14-year-old’s genetic code belongs in a criminal database, has outrun its own justification. Congress and the public deserve a full accounting, not another FOIA fight years down the road.