By escalating DNA surveillance, the Trump administration is causing a “worrying trend” that is leading the country down a dangerous path, warn law professors Daniel I. Morales, Natalie Ram and Jessica L. Roberts in an opinion piece published on January 23 in The New York Times.
After announcing a new rule in October 2019, the federal government officially began collecting DNA from any person held in immigration custody on January 6 of this year. Prior to that, detained immigrants were only required to give fingerprints to border officials. Morales, professor at the University of Houston Law Center, Ram, associate professor of law at the University of Maryland Francis King Carey School of Law, and Roberts, director of the Health Law & Policy Institute at the University of Houston Law Center, believe “the federal government took a decisive step toward collecting and tracking large numbers of its citizens’ genetic information too.”