The Center on Privacy and Technology, which investigates emerging surveillance technologies and their impacts on civil liberties, contends the agency’s aggressive DNA collection is but one node in a broader effort to redefine policing through vast use of biometric and behavioral data. In a 2024 report, it argued that genetic surveillance has “almost no use in immigration enforcement operations as they currently function,” suggesting the practice is a stalking horse for normalizing the use of genetic profiling across everyday police work.
Constitutional law expert David Cole flagged this mission creep in the wake of the US government’s post-9/11 abuses, writing: “Measures initially targeted at noncitizens may well come back to haunt us all.” Surveillance scholars have also widely observed that new technologies—especially those with invasive potential—are often deployed against vulnerable groups before being normalized across society.
Immigrants, under this regime, are more frequently targeted for biometric data collection because they are mostly powerless politically, unable to resist being cast as test subjects in surveillance programs that, once embedded, rarely retain their original scope. {read}