Like so many other border actions, this is bad law, bad policy, & poor intel. Overly intrusive, extremely costly, and unlikely to yield meaningful information in the vast majority of cases. Still makes sense to use DNA testing in one-off cases (e.g. crime solving) but not in bulk
Lots of research shows the ways biometrics can reinforce structural inequality. In today's climate, this kind of bulk testing, especially in an immigration context, also leads to real risk of misuse for ethnic profiling. I wrote about that risk here: bit.ly/2TEDLBm
Fun fact: the Human Genome Project - the first-ever attempt to sequence the entire human genome - was a hugely ambitious, multi-billion$ effort in 1990 when it was kicked off. By 2003, it was complete. In 2019, it's so cheap that millions of people take home DNA tests for $100.
Immigration-related DNA testing is ripe for abuse. But, right now, it's legal. One of the major privacy challenges in DNA and other biometrics collection is that the tech has leaped forward faster than civil liberties risks are fully accounted for in policy and law.
Increased compute power has fostered an exponential increase in the types and amounts of biometric data that are collected and analyzed. As cheaper tech makes more bulk biometrics analysis possible, the law needs to catch up quickly to mitigate the risks that go with it.
