Immigration enforcement drives surge in FBI DNA database

U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) may have added nearly 920,000 DNA profiles to the FBI’s national criminal database in 2025, according to a Georgetown Law analysis that suggests immigration enforcement has become a major source of new entries in the Combined DNA Index System (CODIS).

ICE does not disclose submission totals, and the FBI does not identify which agency contributed each profile. Georgetown estimated ICE’s total by subtracting roughly 75,000 known CBP submissions from the nearly 995,000 profiles added to CODIS’s detainee index during 2025.

Internal ICE records show the agency collected just 3,609 DNA samples in fiscal 2020 and 16,392 through mid-May 2021. Georgetown’s estimate suggests that figure rose to more than 2,500 collections a day in 2025.

Many of those people were detained under civil immigration authority and had not been convicted of a crime.

Once entered into CODIS, their profiles can be searched by law enforcement agencies nationwide against biological evidence from unresolved crimes, including evidence collected years after the person’s detention.

The FBI also retains the underlying biological sample, which contains far more genetic information than the identifying profile entered into CODIS.

The expansion is the latest stage of a program Biometric Update has followed since the first Trump administration.

In October 2019, the Department of Justice proposed eliminating a regulatory provision that had allowed the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) to exempt many immigration detainees from mandatory DNA collection because of operational and resource constraints.

CBP began testing the process in January 2020, collecting cheek swabs from people in custody who were subject to fingerprinting.

The DHS privacy assessment governing the program said CBP and ICE would send the samples to the FBI Laboratory, which would derive profiles and place them in the National DNA Index System, the national level of CODIS.

The Justice Department finalized the rule in March 2020, effective April 8 of that year. It removed the DHS secretary’s authority to grant a broad exemption and restored the attorney general’s power to direct DNA collection from non-U.S. persons detained under federal authority.

The department characterized DNA collection as a routine identification procedure comparable to fingerprinting and photographing, while also emphasizing that profiles would be searched against evidence from crimes.

The program grew rapidly but unevenly.

The Government Accountability Office found that CBP collected nearly one million samples from fiscal 2020 through 2022. In fiscal 2022, however, the agency obtained DNA from only about 634,000 of the nearly 1.7 million people it encountered under immigration enforcement authority.

Some individuals were exempt, but CBP lacked adequate records to determine whether other omissions were appropriate. Collection-kit shortages also prevented agents from swabbing some people who were subject to the requirement.

GAO recommended better tracking of why samples were not taken, recommendations CBP subsequently implemented.

President Donald Trump accelerated the program after returning to office. His January 20, 2025, Securing Our Borders executive order directed the attorney general and homeland security secretary to take “all appropriate action” to fulfill the DNA Fingerprint Act’s requirements for all aliens detained under federal authority.

It separately directed DHS to use available technology to verify claimed family relationships.

Those are legally and operationally distinct uses of DNA.

Familial testing compares samples from an adult and child to determine whether they are biologically related. The CODIS collection program instead creates a law enforcement identification profile that can be searched against crime scene evidence.

DHS has said only that childrens’ DNA profiles placed in CODIS were done through its family-verification program but has not explained why children’s profiles had been sent to the FBI’s criminal database.

The distinction has become increasingly important as evidence emerges that immigration authorities collected samples from children below the agency’s stated minimum age.

As Biometric Update reported in June 2025, CBP records showed that more than 133,000 children and teenagers had already had their DNA submitted to CODIS, including children as young as four.

DHS documents had previously described routine collection as applying to people between 14 and 79.

The newly released data show that the problem continued. Georgetown identified 492 children under 14 whose profiles CBP sent to the FBI between January 2025 and January 2026.

They included 33 seven-year-olds, 32 six-year-olds, 21 five-year-olds, and a four-year-old Mexican child processed in El Paso in January.

ICE has also been collecting DNA from families detained at the Dilley Immigration Processing Center in Texas.

Members of Congress who visited the facility in May said officials gave conflicting explanations about why the samples were taken, where they were sent, and how long they would remain there.

DHS later told Democratic Representatives Joaquin Castro, Greg Stanton, and Nanette Barragán that ICE could collect DNA from children beginning at age 14 and confirmed that samples collected through the CODIS program were sent to the FBI.

Attorneys monitoring conditions under the Flores settlement, which governs federal treatment of migrant children, said families frequently did not understand which DNA program was being used or why they were being tested.

The government has begun prosecuting people who resist.

Internal ICE correspondence obtained by Georgetown complicates the government’s longstanding description of DNA collection as an identification measure.

In March 2025, an ICE attorney wrote that the authority’s “primary purpose” was the construction of a national DNA database for solving crimes rather than family verification.

That description goes directly to the constitutional dispute surrounding the program. The Supreme Court upheld warrantless collection from people arrested for serious crimes in Maryland v. King, relying heavily on the government’s argument that DNA served a booking and identification function.

Immigration detention often involves no criminal accusation, yet the resulting profile is retained for future criminal searches.

The expansion is already being challenged beyond immigration custody. Four U.S. citizens sued after federal agents allegedly took their DNA when they were detained during protests outside an ICE facility in Broadview, Illinois.

Army veteran George Retes Jr. has separately challenged the collection of his DNA after agents detained him during an immigration raid at a California cannabis farm where he worked as a security guard.

The volume is also straining the FBI’s processing infrastructure. Its fiscal 2027 budget request seeks 45 positions and $23.4 million to expand federal DNA databasing and laboratory operations.

The FBI said submissions rose above 50,000 a month following the 2020 DHS expansion, reached more than 180,000 during February 2024, and produced a processing backlog of 1.8 million samples by the end of fiscal 2024.

By December 2025, the CODIS detainee index contained more than 3.34 million profiles, up from just over 23,000 in 2016. It now accounts for more than 17 percent of the broader offender index against which police search crime scene evidence, according to Georgetown.

If DHS and criminal justice agencies continue collecting at their 2025 rates, Georgetown projects that profiles supplied through DHS detention authority could constitute more than one-third of the searchable offender index by 2030.

What began as an immigration enforcement requirement would, by then, have become one of the principal foundations of the country’s criminal DNA infrastructure.

Article Topics

biometric database  |  biometrics  |  criminal ID  |  dna  |  FBI  |  immigration  |  U.S. Government