ICE’s DNA Collection Increases, SpaceX’s Rocket Crashes

What happened

Leah Feiger: I feel like we're getting inundated with here's one more part of your privacy, here's one more part of security, here's one more bit of immigrants being treated as subhuman. But this one, at least enough for me, broke through the noise. Don't you guys think? This was wild.

That included 21 5-year-olds, 32 6-year-olds, 33 7-year-olds who are now in an FBI DNA database for the rest of their lives. " It's all supposed to be about how the primary purpose is to build a national DNA database for solving crimes, which is a theory. OK, sure. Solving crimes, cool about that. But these are 5-year-olds.

These are 5-year-olds whose—so many of their rights have already been taken away by this current administration and DOJ and DHS. To have that as an additional marker to me is a really important visual next step of the war on immigrants at this moment in the country. Zoe Schiffer: All right. I'm going to take us from the depths of despair. Just drag us up.

Brian Barrett: Some would say AI slop is maybe not the depths, but we're definitely still in despair territory. Leah Feiger: I mean, I love the depths of despair, my favorite place to be. Zoe Schiffer: I find it funny, but I have a bunch of thoughts on it and my views on this have been evolving really rapidly, so I'm excited to talk to you about it.

Leah Feiger: Good, good, good, good. Zoe Schiffer: Last week, Google rolled out a new AI feature on Google Earth, which would basically let anyone zoom into real coordinates on a map and type a prompt just like you would in ChatGPT or Gemini and superimpose an AI scene on top of real Google satellite imagery. Brian Barrett: What could go wrong?

Zoe Schiffer: Yeah, I have a hard time imagining how no one during this process said, "This is a terrible idea," or perhaps they did and they were not listened to. But regardless, Google did this. As you might imagine, it took 24 hours for people to generate fabricated nuclear plants in Iran, a bombed hospital in Gaza, and fires at an Iranian oil terminal.

Why it matters

Zoe Schiffer: I feel like I have a question before we move forward, which is maybe one that's shared by listeners. Why is DNA being collected from immigrants in the first place? This surprised me, and maybe I'm a little naïve about what they're subjected to when they're in this country. Brian Barrett: Yeah, I mean, I think the answer is because they can.

And I wish that we're more nuanced or subtle than that, but I think they are just trying to gather as much information as they can at all times. I want to be clear too, these are not people with criminal convictions, people who are even necessarily suspected of a crime. It is just such a wide net that they are casting.

In fact, internal training materials that drove, in partnership with researchers at Georgetown, we should say, dug up, said that asylum seekers and refugees who have not adjusted their immigration status must have their DNA sampled and that the DNA needs to be collected after any arrest. It is just table stakes for these officers to grab DNA whenever and wherever they can.

Leah Feiger: And already a lot of lawmakers have been speaking out against this. For example, when learning that children were being swabbed at a family detention center in Dilley, Texas, a number of representatives said in a joint statement to WIRED, none of the families at Dilley have been convicted of a crime. They do not belong in a database meant for violent criminals, especially children.

This is starting to pick up steam across the board. I think that we've just gotten so used to the idea that the government is allowed to collect any information it wants, store it in whichever way it wants. And all of these norms have been destroyed in the last year and a half. It's really shocking, honestly.

Zoe Schiffer: So you're saying basically that refusing to allow your DNA to be collected can become its own chart, can become a mark on your record regardless of what you had previously. Brian Barrett: Not only a mark on your record. WIRED and Dhruv identified two prosecutions filed in 2025 against people in immigration custody who refused DNA collection. " That's one thing.

Then the other thing too that I think we've mentioned, but I want to dig into a little bit, is that they have started recently... I think the shift to collecting DNA from families is also relatively new.

And we're talking about, I think the official line is that kids as young as 14 can have their DNA collected, but Georgetown and WIRED identified 492 children under 14 whose DNA the agency sent to the FBI, not just collected, but sent onto the FBI between January 2025 and January 2026.

What to watch

People were extremely upset about this for misinformation, disinformation, and other reasons, and Google quickly disabled the feature. It just feels like there is a real split between how Silicon Valley feels about AI and uses AI and how the rest of the country feels about it and uses about it because these tools are pretty unpopular, even as they're being widely adopted.

But I think that the way that they're being adopted is also really different. Most people are using ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude as basically a replacement for Google. Whereas in Silicon Valley, they're using it as a replacement for a personal assistant or a junior employee.