The Trump administration will, yet again, conduct rapid DNA testing on some migrant families at the southern border, CNN reports, “to help identify and prosecute individuals posing as families in an effort to target human smuggling.” A Homeland Security official told CNN that the DNA testing, which shows results in about 90 minutes, “will run for two to three days in two border locations.”
The administration has repeatedly claimed, without evidence, that individuals are posing as “fake families” with “recycled” kids in order to cross the border and be detained for as short a time as possible. Homeland Security and Immigration and Customs Enforcement “did not provide any specific instances where such activity took place,” BuzzFeed reported last month.
This isn’t the first time the administration has done this, either: Officials also conducted DNA testing on families that were forcibly separated last year and scattered throughout various detention facilities without proper record keeping, and, just like then, advocates are rightfully concerned about issues including privacy and consent.
An ICE official claimed that “the information collected in the DNA test will not be stored or shared,” but ICE isn’t exactly the most trustworthy agency. There’s also the matter of consent, because some of these families speak indigenous languages and Homeland Security has not done enough in terms of interpretation services.
Nor is it clear what will happen to families that aren’t biological parents and their children, but instead an uncle and his nephew, for example. What about nonbiological parents? We do know that children who traveled with an aunt or uncle were separated and sent to a prison camp in Florida that the administration claimed jailed only unaccompanied minors, or kids who came to the U.S. alone.
“If they came with an uncle, an aunt, an older brother or sister, they’re not considered separated,” Rep. Sylvia Garcia of Texas said after touring the Homestead prison camp earlier this year. “We spoke with a number of kids and they all said they came with someone. But they were separated, so it’s still happening.”