Tom Homan reveals Biden admin's termination of DNA testing program for illegal immigrant families increased child trafficking

Tom Homan revealed during a press briefing on Monday something that many had already forgotten. The Biden administration ended a program from Trump's first administration to DNA test children and families at border crossings. 

That cancellation facilitated the trafficking of children, as there was no way to verify that they were with a trusted parent or relative. Critics said at the time that this was dangerous, but Biden's team ended it anyway, with advocates saying it was unethical to do the testing. 

"Family residential centers are for families," Homan said in response to questions about family separation. "They're not jails, they're open-air campers built for families, which means they have child psychologists, they have pediatricians. And why family residential centers? Because we want to make sure that child is with a parent.

Under the Biden administration, "which stopped DNA testing," Homan revealed, many children were "smuggled into the country with someone that wasn't related to them claiming to be a parent. So we'll make sure children are with parents. We will make sure that's actually a family and that child ain't being trafficked."

The reason the DNA testing came about under the first Trump administration was as a direct result of the Flores decision, which ruled that unaccompanied minors, and then minors who were accompanied, could only be detained for 20 days before being released into the US. Their guardians were released along with them, per the ruling from California Judge Dolly M. Gee. This made the United States a prime place into which to traffic children.

"The ethical and social implications of DNA relationship testing in the context of immigration are compounded by a combination of the vulnerabilities of migrant populations and the potential harms that might arise from testing," wrote the NIH in September 2021. 

They also offered concerns about the "power differential" they believed was present between those getting tested and those requiring the test. "Many of the potential harms of DNA testing are shared across immigration and health-related contexts, including discrimination, stigmatization, privacy violations, revelation of sensitive information (such as misattributed parentage), and poorly informed or coerced consent.

"In immigration contexts," the NIH warning against DNA testing continued, "these risks are heightened by the power differential between those undergoing testing and those ordering the tests. While healthcare providers might be considered figures of authority, immigration agents or officials have the power to make decisions about families’ futures based on genetic information. The recent, rapid expansions of DNA testing for relationship verification in US immigration contexts—in both volume and purpose—demonstrate this power."

By May 2023, the Subcommittee on National Security, the Border, and Foreign Affairs announced plans to investigate the "concerning reports that US Customs and Border Protection (CBP) will cease familial DNA testing of purported family units on May 31, 2023," which the subcommittee said was due to the expiration of a contract with a DNA testing company. 

The Subcommittee said that "President Biden’s open borders agenda has created a humanitarian crisis that encourages the trafficking of migrant children into the United States. In fiscal year 2022, 2.76 million migrants illegally crossed the southern border.

"Cartels have exploited President Biden’s disastrous border policies to create one of the largest human trafficking and smuggling operations in the world. An estimated 60 percent of unaccompanied minors crossing the border are forced into child pornography and drug trafficking by cartels."

In their critique of the Biden administration ending the program, the Federation for American Immigration Reform argued in July 2023 that "Despite the success of the program in identifying smugglers and traffickers, the Biden Administration has made the inexplicable decision to terminate it. The only reason that has been made available to date is that the government’s contract with the DNA testing company expired and the Biden Administration simply chose not to renew it.  

"But open-borders groups have long complained about the DNA tests, claiming that they are 'invasive' and violate the 'privacy rights' of illegal aliens.  Some have even claimed that human trafficking is not a serious enough problem to justify the cheek swabs and argued that biology does not alone determine family relationships."