Biden Is About to Hand Over a Vast and Unconstitutional DNA Database to Trump
By Emily Tucker,
Truthout
| 01. 07. 2025
Every person’s privacy, security and civil rights are implicated by this program.
As Donald Trump’s return to the White House looms, dismantling the most dangerous weapons in the arsenal of executive power should be the Biden administration’s highest priority for its last days. The most obvious of these relate to the president’s war-making powers, particularly authority over nuclear deployment. But there is another apparatus of coercion that will be at Trump’s fingertips, one which has been neglected in the conversation about what a fully realized authoritarian regime might look like in the United States: the vast national digital surveillance infrastructure and, most crucially, its broad and continually expanding genetic surveillance capabilities.
Last May, my organization, the Center on Privacy & Technology at Georgetown Law, published Raiding the Genome, a new report exposing the massive DNA collection program being run by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). We found that over the last four years, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Customs and Border Patrol (CBP) took DNA from over 1.5 million people. This is nearly 50 times the number of samples they collected in all preceding years combined, an increase...
Related Articles
By Margaux MacColl, The San Francisco Standard | 09.17.2025
Designer babies are coming soon to an IVF clinic near you.
Nucleus Genomics, founded by Kian Sadeghi in 2020, when he was just 20, got its start analyzing genomes to weigh a person’s risk of everything from cancer to ADHD...
By Johana Bhuiyan, The Guardian | 09.23.2025
In March 2021, a 25-year-old US citizen was traveling through Chicago’s Midway airport when they were stopped by US border patrol agents. Though charged with no crime, the 25-year-old was subjected to a cheek swab to collect their DNA, which...
By Annika Inampudi, Science | 08.01.2025
In June, Sara* received a message asking whether she wanted to continue to participate in a massive, multicenter research project led by scientists at Aarhus University in Denmark. The iPsych study, the message said, had sequenced her genetic data from...
The Center for Genetics and Society is delighted to recommend the current edition of GMWatch Review – Number 589. UK-based GMWatch, a long-standing ally, was founded in 1998 by Jonathan Matthews as an independent organization seeking to counter the enormous corporate political power and propaganda of the GMO industry and its supporters. Matthews and Claire Robinson are its directors and managing editors.
CGS works to ensure that social justice, equity, human rights, and democratic governance are front...