Raiding the Genome: How the United States Government Is Abusing its Immigration Powers to Amass DNA for Future Policing

Around the world, governments are quietly stockpiling one of the most intimate forms of personal data imaginable: our DNA. What began as a tool for identifying suspects and reuniting families has become a global infrastructure for surveillance—an invisible archive of our genetic code, stored and searchable.

In 2024, Georgetown Law’s Center on Privacy & Technology sounded the alarm in a report titled Raiding the Genome: How the United States Government Is Abusing its Immigration Powers to Amass DNA for Future Policing. The findings were stark: U.S. immigration authorities are collecting DNA on a massive scale, far beyond what the law permits.

In a follow-up report last month, the Center reveals that Customs and Border Protection is taking DNA from American citizens, too—routinely, without consent, and without oversight—then funneling those samples to the FBI. Once there, they’re added to the national criminal database known as CODIS, where law enforcement agencies nationally can access and search them.

Guest - Stevie Glaberson. Director of Research & Advocacy for the Center, and an author of the report. She joined the Center after serving as a Visiting Professor and the Director of Georgetown Law’s Civil Litigation Clinic, which she helped found as a clinical teaching fellow and staff attorney.

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Inventing Antifa

On October 18, No Kings Day, in her popular Newsletter, author Sarah Kendzior wrote a disturbing column titled Inventing Antifa. It begins: "In 2005, the Uzbek government invented a group called 'Akromiya' to justify a massacre of protesters. Now I worry the US government will do the same." She recounted how on May 13, 2005, the Uzbek government killed over 700 civilians gathered in the eastern city of Andijon to protest the economic, social, and political conditions of Uzbekistan. Prompted by the imprisonment and subsequent jailbreak of popular local businessmen, the crowd grew to 10,000 people, some drawn by a rumor that their dictator, President Karimov, would address the largest protest in Uzbekistan’s history. Instead, military forces greeted the demonstrators. According to the Uzbek government, the forces targeted only armed insurgents, 187 of whom were killed. But according to nearly all other accounts, the military fired indiscriminately into the crowd, murdering at least 700 people, including children.

At the center of the massacre was a group the Uzbek government called “Akromiya." According to the Uzbek government, Akromiya armed the militants, Akromiya gave the orders, Akromiya was responsible for the deaths of Uzbek citizens in Andijon. Akromiya was a menace that had to be stamped out at any cost. There was one problem with this theory: Akromiya — according to Uzbek and international human rights groups, political organizations, journalists, citizens, and accused Akromiya members themselves — did not exist. The Uzbek government had invented “Akromiya,” which became the all-purpose label slapped on any Uzbek who dared to dissent.

Kendzior believes that just as the Uzbek government invented the bogeyman "Akromiya" to justify the brutal suppression of dissent, Donald Trump is using the label Antifa to do the same to suppress and criminalize the rising resistance against his fascist regime in the United States. Kendzior knows alot about the myth of "Akromiya" because she's the one who debunked it, so we're very pleased to have her with us today on Law and Disorder.

Guest - Sarah Kendzior is the bestselling author of The View From Flyover Country, Hiding In Plain Sight and They Knew. Her latest book The Last American Road Trip was published this year and I had the pleasure of reviewing it - favorably I might add - for Ms Magazine. From 2018 until 2023, she was the co-host of Gaslit Nation, a weekly podcast and she is well-known for her coverage of the Trump administration and for writing about authoritarianism, kleptocracy, transnational organized crime, racism and xenophobia, media, voting rights, technology, the environment, and corruption, among other topics. Sarah holds a PhD in anthropology from Washington University in Saint Louis and an MA in Central Eurasian Studies from Indiana University In August 2013, Foreign Policy journal named her one of “the 100 people you should be following on Twitter to make sense of global events."