ICE Collected Nearly 1 Million Peopleâs DNA Last YearâIncluding Young Children
On March 13, 2025, Hugo Moreno-Mendez arrived at the McLennan County Probation Department in Waco, Texas, expecting a routine probation check-in. Instead, Immigration and Customs
On March 13, 2025, Hugo Moreno-Mendez arrived at the McLennan County Probation Department in Waco, Texas, expecting a routine probation check-in. Instead, Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers were waiting to arrest him. According to a criminal complaint reviewed by WIRED, officers drove Moreno-Mendez to a nearby ICE field office. There, one deportation officer after another approached him with the same demand. Open your mouth. One officer tried to take his fingerprints and swab the inside of his cheek for DNA. He refused. Then another tried. Then a third. Each time, Moreno-Mendez refused. Four days later, Moreno-Mendez was charged with failing to register as a noncitizen and refusing to provide DNA while in federal custodyâthe latter a misdemeanor that, as of 2021, ICE itself said it was unaware had ever been accepted for prosecution. WIRED has made this article free for all to read because it is primarily based on reporting from Freedom of Information Act requests. Please consider subscribing to support our journalism. Moreno-Mendez took both counts to trial. On August 18, 2025, a magistrate judge in Waco found him guilty of each and sentenced him to time served.
Moreno-Mendezâs case is part of a sweeping expansion of DNA collection from people held for civil immigration violationsâa federal campaign that, backed by the threat of prosecution, funnels the genetic profiles of nearly everyone in ICE custody into an FBI database built for criminal investigations. New research from Georgetown Law's Center on Privacy and Technology estimates that the Department of Homeland Security has become the largest single source of new genetic profiles in the nation's criminal DNA system, with ICE alone potentially adding as many as roughly 920,000 profiles in 2025. The vast majority of people in ICE custody have no criminal conviction, and residing in the US undocumented is typically a civil, not criminal, offense. Yet once the DNA profiles of detained people enter the FBIâs Combined DNA Index System, or CODIS, law enforcement agencies across the country can compare them against evidence from unsolved crimesâand against crime-scene DNA collected years or even decades from now. The physical sample, which holds a person's entire genome, sits in a federal laboratory indefinitely. The expansion of DNA collection has extended to families held in immigration detention, sparked lawsuits over the collection of DNA from protesters and others who allege they should never have been subjected to the program, and drawn congressional scrutiny after lawmakers learned that children were being swabbed at a family detention center in Dilley, Texas.
The BriefWire