
DHS to start DNA testing to establish family relationships on the border - howard941
https://www.cnn.com/2019/04/30/politics/homeland-security-dna-testing-immigration/index.html
======
epistasis
Those who do genetic testing in the clinic know that, far more frequently than
expected, family relations do not line up exactly as the genetic inheritance
happens. Clinicians go to great lengths to avoid damaging families with these
revelations. I have a feeling that such ethics will not be brought to these
situations by DHS.

~~~
gcb0
this has nothing to do with being correct.

there's a rush by law enforcement to create a DNA database.

and if you did at a clinic or 23and me et al, be sure that your dna plus some
metadata (if not from you, from your payment or from the lab, anything that
goes around hippa is game) is already cataloged there.

couple months ago a newspaper shown how cheap private investigators paid for
this data to narrow down location of people they were paid to locate.

~~~
toss1
> there's a rush by law enforcement to create a DNA database. True, But this
> has nothing to do with that (at least at this point). TFA specifically
> stated that no data would be retained, they are just looking for results in
> 90 minutes, evidently to verify if someone claims parenthood of a child,
> they really are the parent.

If it is actually used to make human trafficing more difficult, it is a good
thing.

(Don't ask me whether I trust this administration to do anything good, for the
right reasons, within reasonable bounds, with proper controls, or merely act
with sanity and respect -- that is a whole other conversation likely
unsuitable for this forum)

~~~
mindslight
"If <policy> makes <bad thing> harder, it is a good thing" is the wax on the
runners of the sled flying down the slippery slope.

It's fallacious to frame handing more power to centralizing entities solely in
terms of the good they may (possibly) do. There are always downsides, even in
addition to direct misuse - eg 1000 lifetimes lost every year to the TSA
alone.

It's always a trade off, and politics (aka willful ignorance) practically
guarantees it won't be made for the right reasons.

~~~
toss1
True.

Which is why I put the disclaimers in the last two paragraphs ("If it is
actually used" and "Don't ... trust this administration...")

The restricting scope, application purpose, and effective oversight are the
anchor points and crampons that enable us to not slide down the slippery
slope, but get to the top.

------
a_random_name
Because I guess adoptions, or family relationships a little more complicated
than the nuclear family don't exist.

------
thex10
> From October 2017 to February 2018, there was a 315 percent increase in the
> number of cases of adults with minors fraudulently posing as “family units”
> to gain entry.

Gotta wonder what that comes out to as a percentage of all people trying to
gain entry.

The statement also implies that DHS is already determining what is a "family
unit" without DNA. Gotta wonder what their algorithm is there too...

~~~
DuskStar
Separate 'parents' from children, ask children if those are really their
parents?

------
olliej
So no children from prior relationships, no adoptions, no same sex couples,
...

------
natebleker
What will happen to adopted children?

~~~
tomschlick
Hopefully their guardians won't cross the border illegally and put them in
that situation.

~~~
olliej
The comment you replied to is asking “what happens to adopted children”.
Strangely enough crossing the border legally doesn’t magically result in your
adopted children getting new DNA. So claiming that “illegal immigrants” won’t
put their children in that position is beyond stupid. The question is how does
this impact _legal_ immigrants.

This is sampling at actual border crossing. So all the actual families
crossing are victimized in order to punish brown people. Because none of this
is being done on the northern border, despite Canadians living illegally in
the US generally taking higher paying jobs than migrant workers from Mexico
and Central America

~~~
tomschlick
From the article: "DHS has repeatedly warned that children are being exploited
by traffickers to skirt the nation's immigration laws."

So it seems to me that it has to do with people skirting the law and
exploiting children, not to "punish brown people".

> Because none of this is being done on the northern border, despite Canadians
> living illegally in the US generally taking higher paying jobs than migrant
> workers from Mexico and Central America.

Have stats on the number of Candadian's crossing the border illegally each
year? I'd bet its an order of magnitude less than our southern border.

> And then we get to the real crux: as numerous people have said, this
> incorrectly classifies normal families as not being families.

Which is a problem, but this should be used as a tool in conjunction with
other records and interviews of the family crossing.

Think of it this way, if a family crosses with children, takes the DNA test
and everything is confirmed then the process may go much faster as additional
investigation would not be needed.

------
xkcd-sucks
A vacation to the USA could get French people around the paternity test ban

------
zipwitch
Living in a cyberpunk dystopia is much less pleasant than reading about
fictional ones.

------
hourislate
What CNN conveniently didn't tell you was that this kind of screening was all
planned under the Obama administration. It's so convenient to post a picture
of Trump at the top of the article to suggest it was all his idea.

Fuck CNN, it is a shitty fake news site.

Why is this even news since it started under the Obama administration?

Center for Immigration Studies article below.

[https://cis.org/Rush/Expanded-Central-American-Refugee-
Progr...](https://cis.org/Rush/Expanded-Central-American-Refugee-Program-
Bring-Whole-Family)

>The program's numerous conditions ( __DNA tests __, background checks,
medical clearance, etc.) dissuaded some from applying. More importantly, the
majority of the Salvadoran, Guatemalan, and Honduran immigrants present in the
U.S. are here illegally, which makes them ineligible to participate. This
explains why, since the CAM program started almost three years ago, the U.S.
received only 9,500 applications.

Some more news with statistics.

[https://www.cbp.gov/newsroom/stats/sw-border-
migration](https://www.cbp.gov/newsroom/stats/sw-border-migration)

~~~
8note
Reading your links, I couldn't find any numbers for how many children were DNA
tested while Obama was in office? How many was it? or did this launch under
the Trump administration?

I'm unclear about what's "fake news"

that dna testing children is bad? From your comment, it sounds like you think
Obama is infallible, and so anything he did must have been the best, most
moral option possible.

or that the blame should be on Obama? but that doesn't make sense, because
Trump held all the branches of government for 2 years, and didn't rescind
this, when most of his presidency has been about undoing everything Obama did.

