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
Paula Amato & Shoukhrat Mitalipov
[OHSU News/Christine Torres Hicks]
On September 30th, a team of 21 scientists from Oregon Health & Science University (OHSU) published a significant paper in Nature Communications, with a scientifically accurate but, to many, somewhat abstruse headline:
Induction of experimental cell division to generate cells with reduced chromosome ploidy
The lead authors were Shoukhrat Mitalipov, recently described here as “a push-the-envelope biologist,” and his long-term colleague Paula Amato. (Recall that in July the pair had co-published with...
By Pam Belluck, The New York Times | 10.17.2025
Before dawn on a March morning, Doug Whitney walked into a medical center 2,000 miles from home, about to transform from a mild-mannered, bespectacled retiree into a superhuman research subject.
First, a doctor inserted a needle into his back to...
By Elizabeth Dwoskin and Zoeann Murphy, The Washington Post | 10.01.2025
MEXICO CITY — When she walked into an IVF clinic in June, Alin Quintana knew it would be the last time she would try to conceive a child. She had prepared herself spiritually and mentally for the visit: She had traveled to a nearby...
By Rob Stein, NPR | 09.30.2025
Scientists have created human eggs containing genes from adult skin cells, a step that someday could help women who are infertile or gay couples have babies with their own genes but would also raise difficult ethical, social and legal issues...