The Trump administration has gone from wanting to DNA test some families at the southern border to wanting to DNA test as many as 100,000 migrants, Mother Jones reports. The reasoning is that the testing is required due to grossly exaggerated administration claims, notably from former Homeland Security Sec. Kirstjen Nielsen, that individuals are posing as “fake families” with “recycled” kids in order to cross the border.
“The tests are voluntary,” Mother Jones continues, “so migrants whom ICE suspects of posing as families will only be tested if they consent. But the contracting documents suggest that parents would be more likely to be temporarily separated from their children if they do not submit to the test.” And if tests are voluntary, why are officials asking for 100,000 tests? And how will agents obtain consent, when many asylum-seekers speak indigenous languages and Homeland Security has still not done enough to provide interpretation services?
Just as importantly, what will happen to families in which the adult caring for the child or children is perhaps an aunt or grandparent? “Because only parents or legal guardians and their children count as families under ICE’s standards, migrants traveling with siblings and grandchildren under 18 may have been included in the fraud statistics.”
In reality, “the government’s own data shows that fraud cases at the border are rare,” Mother Jones said, with no clear indication if some of those supposed “fraudulent” cases were actually families related in other ways than parent and child. Perhaps to offset outrage, the administration claims “DNA data collected by ICE will be destroyed after the tests are conducted, and the agency will not build a database of people’s DNA.” Right, because it’s not like the government already had a secret database of immigration activists and journalists or anything.