ICE Has Taken DNA From Nearly a Million People This Year, Including Young Children

Key points

• ICE collected DNA from nearly 1 million people in 2024 to 2025, including children under 14, according to a WIRED investigation.
• 492 children younger than 14 had their DNA sent to the FBI between January 2025 and January 2026, including 21 five-year-olds.
• The Department of Homeland Security is now the single largest source of new profiles in the FBI's national DNA database.
• Google disabled a new AI feature on Google Earth after users generated fake maps from real coordinates.
• A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket stage crashed into the moon, leaving a new crater.

What did ICE actually do?

ICE, the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency, collected DNA samples from close to a million people over the past year, including young children, and passed those samples to the FBI's national criminal DNA database, where they stay indefinitely.

WIRED reporter Dhruv Mehrotra, working with researchers at Georgetown University, dug up internal training materials showing that asylum seekers and refugees must have their DNA collected as a matter of routine, even when no crime is suspected. Refusing to give a sample can itself become a criminal charge. Mehrotra identified two prosecutions filed in 2025 against people in immigration custody who said no.

The numbers are stark. Lawmakers who learned that children were being swabbed at a family detention facility in Dilley, Texas, said in a joint statement: "None of the families at Dilley have been convicted of a crime. They do not belong in a database meant for violent criminals, especially children."

Officially, the youngest age for collection is 14. In practice, Georgetown and WIRED found 492 children under that age whose DNA the agency sent on to the FBI, a group that included 21 five-year-olds, 32 six-year-olds, and 33 seven-year-olds. Those profiles now sit in a federal database for the rest of those children's lives.

The Department of Homeland Security has become the single biggest supplier of new entries to that database, a position previously held by state and local police departments.

What else happened this week in AI and tech?

Several other stories broke through the noise this week, covering AI missteps and an unexpected lunar incident.

Google quietly rolled out an AI feature inside Google Earth that let anyone point at real coordinates on the map and type a prompt to overlay a generated scene on top of satellite imagery. The idea collapsed fast. People used it to produce fake maps of real places, which is precisely the kind of low-quality, misleading AI output (often called "AI slop") that users are growing tired of. Google pulled the feature.

Elsewhere, the White House announced a plan to address cybersecurity risks that AI companies create and face, but kept the details classified. That secrecy has raised questions about whether the public or Congress will have any meaningful say in how the rules take shape.

And a piece of a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket, SpaceX's workhorse launch vehicle, struck the moon and left a fresh crater. Nobody was tracking it closely enough to see it coming.

What does the DNA story mean for ordinary people?

If you or anyone in your family interacts with immigration authorities, know that a DNA swab may be taken and that the profile created goes into a criminal database with no expiry date. Refusing carries legal risk. A civil-rights or immigration lawyer is the right first call if you are unsure of your rights in that situation.

For everyone else, this story is a useful reminder that government databases, once filled, rarely shrink.

Common questions

Is the FBI database only for people convicted of crimes?

No. It was originally built around convicted offenders, but it now includes profiles from people who have never been charged with anything, including children, as a result of ICE's collection programme.

Can DNA already in the database be removed?

Federal law allows petitions for expungement in some cases, but the process is difficult and the criteria are narrow. An immigration or civil-rights attorney can advise on specific circumstances.

What is "AI slop" and why does it matter?

AI slop is a colloquial term for low-quality, often inaccurate content generated automatically by AI tools and dumped into feeds, maps, or publications in bulk. The Google Earth incident is one example of how quickly it can create misinformation when AI-generated images are placed over real-world data.