ICE Will Collect Migrants’ DNA: How That Affects American Citizens

Lost in the fury of Ukrainegate, the Trump administration announced a rule to collect DNA samples from all migrants in detention. This will significantly erode basic liberties for American citizens.

How so?

First, the samples will be fed into a national law enforcement database. 
Ordinarily, that database is reserved for people booked for serious crimes such rape, armed assault— that type of crime.

The vast majority of migrants are not suspected of committing any serious crimes—but this plays into the president’s corrosive picture of Mexican rapists, Central Americans M13 gang members (most are fleeing gang violence), and the like.

Now, suppose that a migrant’s DNA matches a Hispanic man in LA who has been booked on drug trafficking charges. Now his family can be a focus for an ICE raid on the reasoning that they probably are in the U.S. without legal status.

Okay, some people might say— if they don’t belong here in the first place, deport them.

So, let’s see this how this affects people whose white ancestors came over on the Mayflower.

In the early 1980s, Nancy Reagan had a famous and potent campaign called, “Just Say No to Drugs.” She convinced her husband do something about this scourge. The Reagan administration then implemented drug testing for certain employees in every Cabinet-level department.

In the Treasury Department (before Homeland Security was a Cabinet position), Customs and Border Patrol officers were all required to be drug tested.

In a major Supreme Court case, the Court ruled that the search and seizure of a person’s urine did not violate the Fourth Amendment.

Critics said the ruling would numb Americans to the taking of their civil liberties—and they were right.

The Fourth Amendment is a limit on government power. No government agency can “search or seize” a person or his/her effects without “probable cause.” The Court said it would be impractical to use a probable cause standard—a shocking concession that the words in the Fourth Amendment don’t actually mean what they say.
Some of readers of this blog are old enough to remember when we would take at least mild offense to being handed a bottle to pee in so that we could be hired. We never asked hard questions about what our prospective employers were searching for—we assumed it was illicit drugs.

This precedent— called National Treasury Employees Union v. Von Raab— has no limit in it.

Fast forward to 2020: Now the same employee group, border patrol agents, are at the center of another “search or seize” operation but this one dwarfs urine testing for drugs.

This opens the door to having a mandatory genetic database— perhaps, for example, to issue a biometric ID card for citizens and legally admitted foreigners.

Meanwhile, the government has a vast store of genetic information. The Mayflower descendants who now live in Iowa will have their DNA run through a supercomputing database every day to see if a strand matches a DNA sample found at a crime scene.

Perhaps the Mayflower family is okay with that.

My question is: What does the Fourth Amendment mean in 2020 and the future? My answer is: Much less than the framers intended.