As a judge’s deadline approaches, a federal official tells CNN the administration is conducting DNA testing on forcibly separated migrant children as part of the process to reunite them with their parents. While DNA companies have offered free tests to help reunite families, immigrant rights groups are opposing this sort of plan, saying that “it's not possible the migrant children—some as young as two months old—are giving their consent to DNA testing.”
Migrant parents have testified that among the few possessions they’ve carried with them to the U.S. have been their children’s birth certificates and other documentation. But as families have been split apart at the border and scattered all over the nation by the government with no plan in place on how to reunite them, advocates like Jennifer K. Falcon of RAICES warn “collecting such sensitive data would allow the government to conduct surveillance on the children ‘for the rest of their lives’”:
The source could not discuss how long the practice has been taking place, if the testing requires consent and if the DNA is stored in a database.
DNA testing isn’t unprecedented: “Under President Obama, the Central American Minors Program mandated DNA testing to verify the relationships between unaccompanied children petitioning to join their parents in the US.” The immigration official who spoke to CNN claimed this round of testing is being done to ensure “reunification with verified parents,” but remember that this particular group of children actually came with their parents and now they’re being tested only because the government split them up in the first place.
This, yet again, adds to the roadblocks some parents are experiencing in being reunited with their kids, including being forced to pay hundreds, sometimes thousands of dollars in airline fees to get their kids back. And now, another cost seems to be handing over the most personal of information. This, advocates say, “is a further demonstration of administration's incompetence and admission of guilt, this further drives home the point we've been saying. They never registered parents and children properly.”