ICE Added an Estimated 920,000 DNA Profiles to the FBI’s Criminal Database in 2025, a Georgetown Report Finds — Including 492 Children Under 14

A report published Aug. 3, 2026, by Georgetown Law’s Center on Privacy and Technology, titled “Raiding the Genome,” estimates that Immigration and Customs Enforcement submitted roughly 920,000 DNA profiles to the FBI’s Combined DNA Index System during 2025 — about 2,500 collections a day. ICE does not publish submission totals and the FBI does not identify contributing agencies; Georgetown derived the figure by subtracting roughly 75,000 known Customs and Border Protection submissions from the nearly 995,000 profiles added to the CODIS detainee index that year. Records released to Georgetown identified 492 children under 14 whose profiles CBP sent to the FBI between January 2025 and January 2026, including a four-year-old processed in El Paso, even though DHS policy sets a minimum collection age of 14. Internal ICE correspondence from March 2025 obtained by Georgetown describes the authority’s “primary purpose” as building a national database for solving crimes rather than verifying family relationships.

Most people ICE detains have no criminal conviction, but once a profile enters CODIS it can be searched by police nationwide against evidence from unsolved crimes indefinitely, and the FBI retains the underlying biological sample. By December 2025 the detainee index held more than 3.34 million profiles, up from just over 23,000 in 2016, and more than 17% of the offender index police search. Georgetown projects it could exceed one-third by 2030 at current rates.

DHS says children’s profiles were collected through its family-verification program but has not explained why they reached the criminal database. Related litigation is pending, including suits by four U.S. citizens detained outside an ICE facility in Broadview, Ill., and by an Army veteran detained during a California raid.