What happened
The short describes a report saying that ICE collected close to one million DNA profiles in the past year, including from people held for civil immigration matters, and that those profiles go into the FBI database known as CODIS. The “nearly one million” figure comes from a July 2026 update by Georgetown Law’s Center on Privacy and Technology, a university research center. We could not find that number on any federal page, so we do not repeat it here as a fact. What we can show is the rule that requires the collection, when it started, and where the sample goes, in the government’s own words.
The rule is 28 CFR 28.12(b). It says that “any agency of the United States that arrests or detains individuals or supervises individuals facing charges shall collect DNA samples from individuals who are arrested, facing charges, or convicted, and from non-United States persons who are detained under the authority of the United States.” It defines “non-United States persons” as people who are not U.S. citizens and are not lawful permanent residents. The Attorney General issued that rule on December 10, 2008, and agencies had to implement it by January 9, 2009. From 2010 to 2020, under an exchange of letters between DHS and the Justice Department, DHS was exempted from collecting DNA from immigration detainees because of what the rule then called “operational exigencies or resource limitations.” On March 9, 2020, the Justice Department published a final rule, effective April 8, 2020, that removed that exemption authority. In the rule’s own words: “This rulemaking does not contain any new DNA-sample collection mandate.” What changed was who could grant exceptions.
DHS described the process in a joint CBP and ICE privacy impact assessment, DHS/ALL/PIA-080, dated July 23, 2020. Officers take a cheek swab with a kit supplied by the FBI Laboratory, and “all DNA samples are mailed to the FBI Laboratory no later than the next business day.” The assessment states that “no DNA samples are retained by DHS”; the FBI processes the sample and stores “the resulting DNA profile” in CODIS. CBP began a pilot on January 6, 2020, and said it was collecting nationwide by December 31, 2020. ICE’s Enforcement and Removal Operations began its own pilot in May 2020, according to the DHS Inspector General’s May 2021 report. The GAO reviewed CBP’s program in May 2023 and reported that in fiscal year 2022, “of the nearly 1.7 million individuals encountered by OFO and Border Patrol under their immigration enforcement authority, the agencies collected DNA samples from about 634,000 of these individuals, or 37 percent.” FBI data cited by GAO show the FBI received about 601,000 samples from CBP that year.
Who this is about
Per the rule, two groups: anyone arrested on federal criminal charges, including U.S. citizens and permanent residents, and non-U.S. persons “detained under the authority of the United States,” which includes people held on immigration violations with no criminal charge. The rule lets agencies limit collection to people they fingerprint, and it lists groups DHS does not have to collect from: people “lawfully in, or being processed for lawful admission to, the United States,” people “held at a port of entry during consideration of admissibility and not subject to further detention or proceedings,” and people held in maritime interdiction. In the 2020 rule, the Justice Department answered comments about asylum seekers directly: those exceptions “do not exclude detained aliens whose legal eligibility to enter or stay in the United States remains to be determined in future proceedings.”
On age, the DHS assessment says CBP’s program “does not include DNA samples from anyone under the age of 14,” with CBP’s port-of-entry officers collecting from people “between the ages of 14 and 79 years old,” and it lists “alien is below 14 years of age” as an exception in ICE’s pilot. CBP’s directive 3410-001A, effective February 12, 2025, adds exceptions for people CBP does not fingerprint, people whose profile CODIS already holds, and people held only on a state warrant. The directive also states that “for privacy reasons, the CODIS database does not contain personal identifying information associated with the DNA profile,” and that the markers used “do not contain genetic, racial, gender, or other sensitive data.” The 2020 rule describes the profiles as “sanitized ‘genetic fingerprints’” that “do not disclose the individual’s traits, disorders, or dispositions.”
Three things the sources do not say. They do not publish how many immigration detainees are in CODIS: the FBI’s statistics page reports “over 20,317,558 offender profiles” as of June 2026 with a footnote that “offender profiles include Convicted Offender, Detainee, and Legal profiles,” and it does not break the detainee count out. We found no ICE public page with ICE’s own totals, and the GAO report covers CBP, not ICE. And the DHS privacy assessment has not been updated since October 2020, according to its own publication page, so it describes pilots and phases, not today’s operations.
What it does not mean
- It does not mean DNA is taken from everyone ICE or CBP speaks to. The rule applies to people taken into custody, may be limited to people who are fingerprinted, and excludes lawful visitors and people being processed for lawful admission. Citizens and permanent residents are covered only if arrested on federal criminal charges.
- It does not mean DHS keeps your genome. Per the DHS assessment, DHS keeps no samples; the FBI holds the sample and the profile. Per the FBI’s own procedures, the profile has no name attached and uses markers described as non-coding.
- It does not mean the profile is temporary. The FBI’s procedures manual (version 15, effective July 1, 2026) defines expungement for convicted offenders whose conviction is overturned and for arrestees whose charges are dismissed or never filed. We did not find a parallel provision for the detainee index in the sources we read. That is a question for a qualified advisor, not something we can answer here.
- It does not mean the practice began in 2026. The requirement has existed since 2009; DHS was exempt from 2010 to 2020; collection by CBP and ICE began in 2020.
What to do with this
If you or a family member have been in CBP or ICE custody and want to know whether a sample was taken, or what a record in CODIS could mean for a case, that is a question for a licensed immigration attorney or a DOJ-accredited representative. They can look at the custody paperwork and the person’s own record. The organizations below are a place to start, and every city page on this directory lists more.
Advocasí is not a law firm. We explain what a policy says and help people prepare their own paperwork once a qualified advisor has told them which path applies.