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The hundreds of thousands of people who enter into federal immigration custody in the US each year may soon have to provide a DNA sample when they arrive. The data from each sample would then be entered into a national criminal database, according to the proposed federal regulation being developed by the Department of Justice. The rule would also allow DNA collection from the more than 40,000 people already held in immigration detention facilities, The New York Times reports.
“Forced DNA collection raises serious privacy and civil liberties concerns and lacks justification, especially when DHS [the Department of Homeland Security] is already using less intrusive identification methods like fingerprinting,” Vera Eidelman, staff attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union’s Speech, Privacy, and Technology Project, tells The Wall Street Journal. “Moreover, it is worth considering the full intersection of the government’s asserted powers when we think about ...
