U.S. Set to Begin a Vast Expansion of DNA Sampling - New York Times
The New York Times

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February 5, 2007
U.S. Set to Begin a Vast Expansion of DNA Sampling
By
JULIA PRESTON

The Justice Department is completing rules to allow the collection of DNA
from most people arrested or detained by federal authorities, a vast
expansion
of DNA gathering that will include hundreds of thousands of illegal
immigrants, by far the largest group affected.

The new forensic DNA sampling was authorized by Congress in a little-noticed
amendment to a January 2006 renewal of the Violence Against Women Act, which
provides protections and assistance for victims of sexual crimes. The
amendment permits DNA collecting from anyone under criminal arrest by
federal authorities,
and also from illegal immigrants detained by federal agents.

Over the last year, the Justice Department has been conducting an internal
review and consulting with other agencies to prepare regulations to carry
out
the law.

The goal, justice officials said, is to make the practice of DNA sampling as
routine as fingerprinting for anyone detained by federal agents, including
illegal immigrants. Until now, federal authorities have taken DNA samples
only from convicted felons.

The law has strong support from crime victims' organizations and some women's
groups, who say it will help law enforcement identify sexual predators and
also detect dangerous criminals among illegal immigrants.

"Obviously, the bigger the DNA database, the better," said Lynn Parrish, the
spokeswoman for the Rape, Abuse and Incest National Network, based in
Washington.
"If this had been implemented years ago, it could have prevented many
crimes. Rapists are generalists. They don't just rape, they also murder."

Peter Neufeld, a lawyer who is a co-director of the Innocence Project, which
has exonerated dozens of prison inmates using DNA evidence, said the
government
was overreaching by seeking to apply DNA sampling as universally as
fingerprinting.

"Whereas fingerprints merely identify the person who left them," Mr. Neufeld
said, "DNA profiles have the potential to reveal our physical diseases and
mental disorders. It becomes intrusive when the government begins to mine
our most intimate matters."

Immigration
lawyers said they did not learn of the measure when it passed last year and
were dismayed by its sweeping scope.

"This has taken us by storm," said Deborah Notkin, a lawyer who was
president of the American Immigration Lawyers Association last year. "It's
so broad,
it's scary. It is a terrible thing to do because people are sometimes
detained erroneously in the immigration system."

Immigration lawyers noted that most immigration violations, including those
committed when people enter the country illegally, are civil, not criminal,
offenses. They warned that the new law would make it difficult for
immigrants to remove their DNA profiles from the federal database, even if
they were
never found to have committed any serious violation or crime.

Under the new law, DNA samples would be taken from any illegal immigrants
who are detained and would normally be fingerprinted, justice officials
said.
Last year federal customs, Border Patrol and immigration agents detained
more than 1.2 million immigrants, the majority of them at the border with
Mexico.
About 238,000 of those immigrants were detained in immigration enforcement
investigations. A great majority of all immigration detainees were
fingerprinted,
immigration officials said. About 102,000 people were arrested on federal
charges not related to immigration in 2005.

While the proposed rules have not been finished, justice officials said they
were certain to bring a huge new workload for the
F.B.I.
laboratory that logs, analyzes and stores federal DNA samples. Federal
Bureau of Investigation officials said they anticipated an increase ranging
from
250,000 to as many as 1 million samples a year.

The laboratory currently receives about 96,000 samples a year, said Robert
Fram, chief of the agency's Scientific Analysis Section.

DNA would not be taken from legal immigrants who are stopped briefly by the
authorities, justice officials said, or from legal residents who are
detained
on noncriminal immigration violations.

"What this does is move the DNA collection to the arrest stage," said Erik
Ablin, a Justice Department spokesman. "The general approach," he said, "is
to
bring the collection of DNA samples into alignment with current federal
fingerprint collection practices." He said the department was "moving
forward aggressively"
to issue proposed regulations.

The 2006 amendment was sponsored by two border state
Republicans
, Senator Jon Kyl of Arizona and Senator John Cornyn of Texas. In an
interview, Mr. Kyl said the measure was broadly drawn to encompass illegal
immigrants
as well as Americans arrested for federal crimes. He said that 13 percent of
illegal immigrants detained in Arizona last year had criminal records.

"Some of these are very bad people," Mr. Kyl said. "The number of sexual
assaults committed by illegal immigrants is astonishing. Right now there is
a fingerprint
system in use, but it is not as thorough as it could be."

Ms. Parrish, of the rape victims' organization, pointed to the case of Angel
Resendiz, a Mexican immigrant who was known as the Railroad Killer. Starting
in 1997, Mr. Resendiz committed at least 15 murders and numerous rapes in
the United States. Over the years of his rampage, Mr. Resendiz was deported
17
times. He was executed in Texas in June.

"That was 17 missed opportunities to collect his DNA," Ms. Parrish said. "If
he had been identified as the perpetrator of the first rapes, it would have
prevented later ones."

Immigration lawyers said the DNA sampling could tar illegal immigrants with
a criminal stigma, even though most of them have never committed any
criminal
offense.

"To equate somebody with a possible immigration violation in the same
category as a suspected sex offender is an outrage," said David Leopold, an
immigration
lawyer who practices in Cleveland.

Forensic DNA is culled either from a tiny blood sample taken from a
fingertip (the F.B.I.'s preferred method) or from a swab of the inside of
the mouth.
Federal samples are logged into the F.B.I.'s laboratory, analyzed and
transformed into profiles that can be read by computer. The profiles are
loaded into
a database called the National DNA Index System.

The F.B.I. also loads DNA profiles from local and state police into the
federal database and runs searches. Only seven states now collect DNA from
suspects
when they are arrested; of those, only two states are authorized by their
laws to send those samples to the federal database.

Mr. Neufeld, of the Innocence Project, said his group supported broad DNA
collection from convicted criminals. But, he said, "There is no demonstrable
nexus
between being detained for an immigration matter and the likelihood you are
going to commit some serious violent crime."

The DNA amendment has divided women's groups that are usually unified
supporters of the Violence Against Women Act, which was adopted in 1994.

"We were stunned by the extraordinary, broad sweep of this amendment," said
Lisalyn Jacobs, vice president for government relations at Legal Momentum, a
law group founded by the
National Organization for Women
. Ms. Jacobs recalled that the amendment had been adopted by a voice vote
with little debate. She said many lawmakers eager to renew the act, which
enjoys
solid bipartisan support, appeared unaware of the scope of the DNA
amendment.

"The pervasive problems of profiling in the United States will only be
exacerbated by such a system," Ms. Jacobs said, because Latino and other
immigrants
will be greatly over-represented in the database. She noted that the law
required a court order to remove a profile from the system.

Many groups warned that the measure would compound already severe backlogs
in the F.B.I.'s DNA processing. Mr. Fram of the F.B.I. said there had been
an
enormous increase in the samples coming to the databank since it started to
operate in 1998, but no new resources for the bureau's laboratory. Currently
about 150,000 DNA samples from convicted criminals are waiting to be
processed and loaded into the national database, Mr. Fram said.

He said the laboratory had added robot technology to speed the processing.
But in the "worst case scenario," where the laboratory receives one million
new
samples a year, Mr. Fram said, "there is going to be a bottleneck."

Copyright 2007
The New York Times Company

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