ICE Funneled ~920K DNA Profiles Into FBI's Criminal Database in 2025

A Georgetown Law study finds that immigration enforcement has quietly become the largest single source of new genetic profiles in the FBI’s Combined DNA Index System (CODIS). The system’s ‘detainee’ sub-index grew by roughly 995,000 profiles in 2025 alone — more than 2,700 people a day — and because ICE refuses to release its numbers, researchers estimate the agency accounts for as many as ~920,000 of them. Most people swabbed have no criminal conviction; living in the US without documentation is typically a civil offense. Yet once a profile enters CODIS, police nationwide can match it against evidence from unsolved crimes indefinitely, and the physical sample — a person’s full genome — sits in a federal lab forever.

The expansion traces to a 2020 DOJ rule that stripped a long-standing exemption sparing immigration detainees from mandatory collection, followed by ICE Directive 10092.1 ordering officers to swab nearly everyone in custody. Internal training slides instruct officers that asylum seekers and refugees are not exempt and that DNA should be taken after ‘ANY arrest,’ backed by the threat of prosecution: one man who repeatedly refused was charged with a misdemeanor and convicted at trial. Collection has reached families and children at detention centers like Dilley, Texas, drawing lawsuits and congressional pushback.

The legal justification is shaky. When DOJ authorized the collection, it leaned on the identification rationale the Supreme Court accepted in Maryland v. King — swabs as a booking-style ID check, not a fishing expedition for unrelated crimes. Critics argue that framing collapses when the profiles are searched against decades of crime-scene evidence. If current rates hold, Georgetown projects DHS will supply more than a third of the searchable criminal DNA index by 2030, four years earlier than previously expected.