The US Department of Homeland Security has come under fire. Six activists who were arrested last year during a peaceful demonstration outside the ICE (U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement) building in Broadview, near Chicago, filed a federal lawsuit on Wednesday, May 6, 2026. The protesters’ lawyers are demanding an immediate halt to the practice of forcibly taking cheek swabs from individuals who have not been charged with any serious crimes.
At the center of the lawsuit is a violation of the Fourth Amendment to the US Constitution, which protects citizens against unreasonable searches. As reported by US media, investigators routinely force arrested demonstrators to provide genetic samples. In the filed complaint, attorneys explicitly point to the political nature of these actions, describing them as part of a surveillance program targeting people for exercising their First Amendment rights.
The core allegation concerns where the collected information ultimately ends up. According to the accusations, the protesters’ samples are permanently uploaded to a centralized federal database known as CODIS (Combined DNA Index System) and stored in government labs. This database was originally designed to identify perpetrators of the most serious crimes based on biological evidence collected at crime scenes.
The lawsuit exposes how, over the span of two decades, this system has evolved into an invasive surveillance tool:
“The federal government has expanded both the amount of genetic information included in the CODIS database and the purposes for which that information may be used, moving beyond the original identification-based model” according to the complaint (Capitol News Illinois).
Expanding the CODIS database with the genetic profiles of peaceful demonstrators has sparked pushback from civil rights defenders. In the eyes of the plaintiffs, the state is dangerously blurring the line between hunting down hardcore criminals and building a biometric database of citizens who are simply voicing their opposition to government policies:
“The federal government has been wrongfully arresting peaceful protesters, collecting their DNA, uploading their genetic profiles to government databases, and storing their DNA samples in federal labs — permanently” – the lawsuit said (Capitol News Illinois).