A member of U.S. Customs and Border Protection has revealed that the agency hasn’t been collecting DNA from detained migrants although it can under the law, Fox News reports.
The DNA Fingerprint Act of 2005, “amends the DNA Analysis Background Elimination Act of 2000 to authorize the Attorney General to: (1) collect DNA samples from individuals who are arrested or detained under U.S. authority; and (2) authorize any other federal agency that arrests or detains individuals or supervises individuals facing charges to so collect DNA samples.”
A rule proposed by the Department of Justice directed agencies to collect DNA “from individuals who are arrested, facing charges, or convicted, and from non-United States persons who are detained under the authority of the United States.”
Whistleblower Mark Jones told Laura Ingraham on “The Ingraham Angle” on Thursday that “We have a great tool that was mandated by and approved by Congress as a law and we're not using it. We are allowing ourselves to apprehend individuals and process them -- and by not taking the DNA sample, we're not giving our law enforcement, both state and federal, the additional tool to solve these outstanding crimes.”
He added that the program received a waiver in 2010 due to “exigent circumstances,” that Jones says have passed.
"We can't get an answer that says why we would allow what was defined as a one-year delay [to] go into nearly a decade," he said. "It was originally based on exigent circumstances of volume of individuals [and] time taken to collect the sample. It was not necessarily personnel, it was about a 15-minute initial process."
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