Funny how the government can always find money and manpower when the project involves watching you, but can never quite get around to watching itself.
Immigration and Customs Enforcement is now harvesting DNA from nearly a million people a year. Not suspects. Not convicts. People in custody, most with no criminal record, including children as young as five and U.S. citizens who got scooped up while protesting at detention centers. The numbers come from Freedom of Information Act records obtained by Georgetown Law’s Center on Privacy and Technology, so this is not some blogger screaming into the void. This is documented.
In 2020, ICE collected 3,609 DNA samples. By 2025, that figure hit roughly 995,000. That is a 10,000% increase. Agents are swabbing more than 2,700 people every single day. Ask yourself: what agency on earth scales up that fast unless somebody at the top decided this was the priority and nobody else was going to get a say?
The samples go straight into the FBI’s Combined DNA Index System, filed under the “Offender” index. These people are accused of no crime. Their genetic material sits in a criminal database alongside actual offenders, and the government stores the physical samples indefinitely. Even if Congress wakes up tomorrow and passes a law, even if a court rules the whole program unconstitutional, those samples stay. Millions of them. Possibly forever. Georgetown’s researchers project that if the current pace holds, DHS could account for more than one-third of the entire FBI criminal DNA database by 2030.
Now here is the part that should make every American’s blood boil. The same agency that somehow found the resources, the logistics, and the will to expand DNA collection by 10,000% in five years has not managed to clip $300 body cameras onto its agents. Three hundred dollars. They can build a genetic dragnet that scoops up toddlers and citizens, but a camera on a uniform is just too complicated. That tells you everything you need to know about what ICE values. Surveillance of you? Unlimited budget. Transparency for them? Can’t figure it out.
Andrea Piacquadio / PexelsAnd the DNA program is just one tentacle. DHS is also expanding facial recognition and iris scanning through a tool called Mobile Fortify, which lets officers capture and store biometric data for up to 15 years without consent. ICE spent over a quarter of a billion dollars in a single year paying private contractors to monitor social media for posts critical of immigration enforcement. Your tax dollars funded that. You paid for the government to watch people who criticized the government.
The whole thing started in 2020, when a new directive mandated sampling for nearly everyone in custody. Before that, DHS could skip collection if it was a resource burden. Then somebody flipped the switch, and the machine has been feeding ever since. No meaningful oversight. No congressional hearings that changed anything. No court order that slowed it down. Just a quiet, relentless accumulation of the most personal data a human being possesses.
The establishment will tell you this is about public safety. They always say that. They said it about the Patriot Act, about mass phone surveillance, about every program that turned out to be sweeping up ordinary Americans who had done nothing wrong. The pattern never changes. They take your freedom in the name of protecting you, and when you ask questions, they call you naive.
Georgetown Law titled its report “Raiding the Genome.” That is exactly what this is. A government agency, operating with essentially no oversight, is building the largest biometric database in American history one cheek swab at a time. And the people who are supposed to be watching the watchers are either asleep or complicit.
Three hundred dollars for a body camera. Too expensive. A quarter billion to monitor your social media posts. No problem. A million DNA samples a year from people who haven’t been charged with anything. Full speed ahead.
Ask yourself who benefits. It is not you.