Former Acting ICE Director Tom Homan said Monday that the Biden administration quietly ended a program that had been used to verify family relationships at the US southern border through DNA testing. The policy, launched under former President Donald Trump, was originally introduced to fight child trafficking by confirming whether adults crossing with minors were actually related.

“Under the Biden administration, which stopped DNA testing,” Homan explained, many children were “smuggled into the country with someone that wasn’t related to them claiming to be a parent.”

Tom Homan: “People always want to say why are you so emotional?… I've talked to little girls as young as nine years old who are raped multiple times by the cartel members.”

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— Defiant L’s (@DefiantLs) April 28, 2025

“Family residential centers are for families,” Homan stated. “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.”

The DNA testing program had been put in place in response to the Flores settlement, a legal ruling that limited how long children—both unaccompanied and accompanied—could be detained. The decision led to the release of minors and the adults with them after 20 days, which immigration officials said made the US a target for trafficking operations.

The House Subcommittee on National Security warned that “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.”

Critics of the program’s cancellation, including the Federation for American Immigration Reform, questioned why the contract wasn’t renewed. “Despite the success of the program in identifying smugglers and traffickers, the Biden Administration has made the inexplicable decision to terminate it,” the group stated in July 2023. “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.”

Supporters of the termination said DNA testing at the border raised privacy and ethical concerns. In a 2021 report, the National Institutes of Health wrote, “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.”

The NIH warned that testing could lead to “discrimination, stigmatization, privacy violations, revelation of sensitive information (such as misattributed parentage), and poorly informed or coerced consent.”

“In immigration contexts,” the NIH 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.”

Tom Homan puts it bluntly to the media:

“Do you know why the Biden administration released millions of people? When you put them in ICE beds, they get a hearing in 35 days. When you release them, it’s 5-9 years. By then, Democrats are back in power and can award mass amnesty.” pic.twitter.com/Oz1s8j3BRE

— Geiger Capital (@Geiger_Capital) April 28, 2025

Homan stressed that without DNA verification, there’s no reliable way to know if a child is being trafficked or truly with a guardian. “We will make sure that’s actually a family and that child ain’t being trafficked,” he said.