Tell Congress: Stop ICE’s Mass DNA Database

ICE is building a mass DNA database of immigrants — including children. It is as dystopian as it sounds.

New reporting reveals that ICE added roughly 920,000 DNA profiles to CODIS, the FBI’s national DNA database system, in 2025 — more than 2,700 profiles per day. The DNA of families seeking safety is being treated like criminal evidence. And children are being pulled into a federal genetic surveillance system before they are old enough to understand what is being taken from them.

This is a terrifying expansion of government power. DNA is not just a fingerprint or a file number. It contains deeply personal information about a person and their family — information that can be stored, searched, shared, and abused for years.

Tell Congress: Investigate ICE’s mass DNA collection program and stop immigration detention from becoming a genetic surveillance dragnet.

No child should be entered into a criminal DNA database because their family crossed a border. No asylum seeker should have their genetic privacy stripped away because ICE detained them. No government agency should be allowed to quietly build a database of people’s genetic information just because it can.

And if ICE is allowed to normalize mass DNA collection from immigrants today, the danger will not stop there. Once the government builds the infrastructure to collect, store, and search people’s genetic information at scale, that power can expand to the rest of us.

Congress must hold hearings, subpoena DHS and FBI records, restrict funding for abusive DNA collection, and pass legislation barring ICE from collecting DNA from people detained for civil immigration reasons alone.

If Congress stays silent, this database will keep growing in the shadows. More families will be treated like suspects. More children will be marked by a system built for criminal investigations. And ICE will gain even more power to surveil vulnerable people with even less accountability.

Add your name now and demand Congress stop ICE’s mass DNA database before this dystopian dragnet grows any larger.

The petition to Congress reads: “Investigate ICE’s mass DNA collection program, remove children and immigrants with no criminal convictions from federal DNA databases, and pass legislation barring ICE from collecting DNA from people detained for civil immigration reasons alone.”