Jul 6, 2018 - Politics & Policy

ACLU demands that immigrant family DNA be removed from database

Activists at the White House

Photo: Eric Baradat/AFP/Getty Images

The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) said on Friday in a hearing over family separation that DNA tests being used to reunited families should be removed from U.S. government databases, CNN reports.

"The government, I gather, is saying we’re going to DNA every single person and it’s gonna delay things. We would say that DNA is a last resort. … It shouldn’t be done in every case, but if it is being done in every case, we would ask that it be used only for reunification and then expunged because I don’t know that we want to be creating a database of all these people.”
— ACLU attorney Lee Gelernt, per CNN
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