Dana Briggs spent decades demonstrating without incident. Then agents shoved the 71-year-old Air Force veteran to the ground outside a Chicago-area ICE facility last September. They took his DNA. Now he leads four plaintiffs in a fresh federal suit that accuses the Department of Homeland Security and FBI of building a genetic record of political opponents.
Arrests That Yielded Permanent Profiles
Briggs wore a “Vets against Trump” shirt that day. He asked why agents yelled at protesters. Someone pushed him. He fell. When an officer reached for his phone, Briggs swatted the hand away in reflex. Body camera footage later cleared him. Charges dropped. Yet his genetic material sits in CODIS. Forever, the complaint says.
Ian Sampson, 27, showed up with a camera. Agents shoved him from behind. He tried to walk away. Hours in custody followed. No charges. A chipped tooth and memories of near-suffocation from tear gas while pinned remain. His profile joined the database too.
Jacqueline Guataquira stood in what organizers called a free-speech zone. She swatted away a phone recording her. Arrested for impeding an officer. Charges later dismissed. Grace Cooper, also 30 and protesting for the first time, got grabbed, slammed down. Released at a gas station with no case number. She refused the swab. Officers told her refusal itself was a crime.
These four now demand an injunction. They want their samples destroyed and the practice halted. The suit, filed May 6 in Illinois federal court, claims violations of the First and Fourth Amendments plus the Administrative Procedure Act. Ars Technica first detailed the complaint.
Only one of 92 non-immigration arrests tied to the Broadview protests ended in conviction. That case involved a prior felony disclosure, unrelated to demonstrating. Most charges evaporated. Two plaintiffs faced nothing at all. But the DNA collection continued. “None of these conditions existed when the government collected Plaintiffs’ DNA,” the filing states, citing Supreme Court limits that require serious offenses, judicial probable cause, and use strictly for identification.
The government sees the matter differently. Federal law requires collection from anyone arrested or facing charges, a DHS spokesperson told NPR in March. The DNA Act, expanded years ago, no longer limits itself to violent felonies. Samples feed the Combined DNA Index System. Profiles stay accessible. Physical material rests in federal labs.
Critics call this mission creep. What began as a tool to link violent criminals across jurisdictions now sweeps up peaceful demonstrators. Privacy impact assessments at the agencies fell to zero last year from 24 in 2024. Expungement demands paperwork, time, and up to five years of waiting under the statute of limitations. Even then, success isn’t guaranteed. Plaintiffs’ families worry too. Genetic relatives could face future scrutiny.
Briggs told The New York Times, “If we don’t have a right to our own selves, everything is going to break down.” His attorney, Carey R. Dunne of the Free + Fair Litigation Group, went further. The unchecked collection “puts you and your family in a surveillance state database of people who’ve criticized this administration.” On an authoritarian scale, Dunne said, “this is a 10.”
The suit places these collections inside a larger pattern. Operation Midway Blitz brought thousands of agents to Chicago. DHS hired 12,000 new ICE officers in under a year. Memos instructed agents to gather images, license plates, hotel details, and protester information into consolidated files. Border Czar Tom Homan pushed for a database of those arrested at demonstrations. Officials described participants as domestic terrorists or violent anarchists, even when charges failed to stick.
Training hours on constitutional protections for protesters dropped sharply. One Instagram recruitment ad featured an image of an agent pinning a demonstrator who was never charged. The caption promised agents would not allow “violent activists” to touch law enforcement. Facial recognition apps, license-plate readers, and social-media monitoring already track participants in real time. DNA adds biological permanence.
Earlier incidents raised similar alarms. In Minneapolis, Steven Saari said agents physically forced a sample after detaining him near a fatal shooting during enforcement actions. McKenna Walker, a 27-year-old citizen, reported agents demanding her DNA; she refused. USA Today reported multiple accounts of swabs taken or attempted after arrests that produced no charges. Those cases fed class-action claims and sworn declarations that describe a pattern.
Legal precedent offers mixed guidance. The Supreme Court upheld DNA collection from serious arrestees for identification purposes. But the plaintiffs argue their alleged offenses — swatting a hand, standing in a designated zone — fall far short. Illinois state law restricts such collection to murder, home invasion, or sexual assault with prior judicial approval. Federal agents bypassed those limits, the suit contends.
And the stakes reach beyond the four named individuals. Hundreds of thousands of profiles enter CODIS monthly. The federal government holds more than 27 million. Once uploaded, profiles support searches that can implicate family members through partial matches. Health information, ancestry, and associations become visible to investigators without fresh warrants. The complaint asserts the government’s real aim is surveillance, not booking.
Plaintiffs report changed behavior already. Briggs doubts he will protest again if DHS agents appear. Guataquira deleted social-media posts and curtailed online advocacy out of fear her parents, who were born abroad, could face targeting. Sampson stays preoccupied with the permanent record. Cooper worries about watch lists that could flag her at airports or traffic stops.
The lawsuit seeks more than personal relief. It asks the court to declare the DNA Act unconstitutional as applied to non-serious, protest-related arrests. It demands destruction of the samples and an end to uploading profiles from similar cases. Success could force agencies to revisit policies that treat any arrest as automatic grounds for genetic sampling.
Broader debates over biometric data collection have intensified since the current administration expanded immigration enforcement. Related suits challenge surveillance of legal observers labeled as domestic terrorists, warrantless home entries, and records on protester monitoring. This case stands out because it centers on the body itself. A cheek swab yields information no other method matches. Once taken, reversal proves difficult.
Attorneys argue the practice converts protected speech into grounds for lifelong biological monitoring. The Constitution, they say, does not permit turning protest participation into indefinite access to a person’s most private data. Government lawyers will likely defend the collections as routine law-enforcement procedure backed by statute. The tension between security needs and individual rights sits at the dispute’s core.
Briggs never expected his DNA to outlast any arrest record. He joined the demonstration because he opposed the scale and tactics of the immigration crackdown. Now his genetic information resides in federal systems alongside those of convicted murderers and rapists. The other plaintiffs, younger and newer to activism, face decades of potential exposure.
Courts have yet to weigh in. The case could climb through appeals. Meanwhile, agents continue operations. New protests draw new arrests. And each swab adds another profile. The plaintiffs want that pipeline shut. Their suit insists that the government cannot arrest first, swab second, and surveil indefinitely when the underlying conduct amounts to nothing more than dissent.
So far, the record shows most charges evaporate. The DNA does not. That asymmetry fuels the legal challenge. It also raises questions about how far authorities may go to catalog those who object to federal policy. The answer may shape not only these four lives but the practical meaning of assembly and speech for years ahead.
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