ICE Collected Nearly 1 Million People’s DNA Last Year—Including 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 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 custody—the latter a misdemeanor that, as of 2021, ICE itself said it was unaware had ever been accepted for prosecution.

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-Mendez’s case is part of a sweeping expansion of DNA collection from people held for civil immigration violations—a 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 FBI’s Combined DNA Index System, or CODIS, law enforcement agencies across the country can compare them against evidence from unsolved crimes—and 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.

“None of the families at Dilley have been convicted of a crime,” US representatives Joaquin Castro, Greg Stanton, and Nanette Barragán said in a joint statement to WIRED. “They do not belong in a database meant for violent criminals, especially children.”

In response to questions from WIRED, a DHS spokesperson defended DNA collection as a border-security and identification measure, saying CBP takes samples from people arrested on federal charges and from detained noncitizens who are subject to fingerprinting and not otherwise exempt. Asked about children whose profiles were submitted to CODIS, DHS pointed to a separate DNA-testing program used to verify family relationships. That program is distinct from the collection at the center of WIRED’s reporting. DHS did not address Georgetown’s estimate that ICE may have added hundreds of thousands of profiles to CODIS in 2025.

For most of the program’s history, migrant DNA collection played out at the border, where Customs and Border Protection swabbed people it took into custody. ICE’s own contribution was marginal. Internal training slides obtained by Georgetown through the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) show ICE collected 3,609 DNA samples in fiscal year 2020 and 16,392 more through mid-May of fiscal 2021—roughly 20,000 in all. CBP was operating on a different scale entirely: Agency spreadsheets Georgetown obtained and analyzed show it sent the FBI the DNA of at least 1.36 million people between October 2020 and the end of 2024, more than a dozen times ICE’s rate during the same time period.

Georgetown’s new report suggests the program entered an entirely different phase in 2025. FBI records show the “detainee” index of CODIS—the sub-index where DHS-collected profiles are stored—reached 3,345,692 profiles by December 2025, growing by roughly 995,000 that year alone. That is more than 2,700 people a day, every day, for a year.