Government using ancestry websites to deport immigrants: lawyer, court documents
By Emanuela Campanella,
Global News [Cites CGS' Katie Hasson]
| 11. 01. 2018
The Canadian Border Services Agency is collecting the DNA of immigrants and using ancestry websites to find long-lost family members in order to establish nationalities.
“CBSA has said that they are using genetic profiling and uploading that information to websites to assist in their investigations for deportation,” Toronto immigration lawyer David Cote told Global News.
Cote says he is aware of several cases in which the federal agency has utilized ancestry websites to assist in their cases. Court documents obtained by Global News shows a CBSA representative admitting to using familytreedna.com to contact the long-lost cousins of Franklin Godwin, who was accepted as a refugee from Liberia and was granted permanent residency in 1996.
“One of the means they decided to use was to take a genetic sample from Mr. Godwin and to upload it onto a website to see if they would be able to match him with anybody,” Cote says.
“Doing that, they were hoping to be able to find where he was from. The idea being that if we were able to find family members, those family...
Related Articles
By Tristan Manalac, BioSpace | 04.02.2024
Verve Therapeutics has suspended enrollment in the Phase Ib Heart-1 study evaluating its lead gene editing program VERVE-101 following a serious adverse event, the company announced Tuesday.
A patient, who received a 0.45-mg/kg dose of VERVE-101, developed a grade 3...
By Timnit Gebru and Émile P. Torres, First Monday | 04.14.2024
The stated goal of many organizations in the field of artificial intelligence (AI) is to develop artificial general intelligence (AGI), an imagined system with more intelligence than anything we have ever seen. Without seriously questioning whether such a system can...
By Harold Brubaker, The Philadelphia Inquirer | 04.04.2024
Acompany started by University of Pennsylvania scientist Jim Wilson has received FDA approval to test a form of gene editing in infants for the first time in the United States, the company said Thursday.
The Plymouth Meeting company, iECURE, is...
By Judith Levine, The Intercept | 04.04.2024
WHEN THE ALABAMA Supreme Court ruled that fertilized embryos were “extrauterine children,” it did more than imperil the future of in vitro fertilization in Alabama and, potentially, the U.S. The ruling, on the claimed “wrongful death” of frozen embryos...
