In late January, Ben and his wife Gabby were driving to their home in Northeast Minneapolis when they received a message on an activist group chat that federal immigration officers were nearby. They had been observing ICE activity in the city for weeks and headed over.
A crowd had already gathered when they arrived. Ben, who requested NPR only use their first names because he fears retaliation from the federal government, stood on the side of the road filming the officers, who were back inside their car and looked like they were about to leave.
"But they stopped and got out of the car," he says. "And that's when I got tackled."
Video of the incident, reviewed by NPR, shows a masked federal officer running at Ben and slamming him to the ground. Three immigration officers pinned him down and dragged him to their vehicle. Ben says he was held in custody for about three hours. Before his release, officers photographed and fingerprinted him. Then, before Ben realized fully what was happening, an officer ran a swab, similar to a Q-tip, along the inside of his cheek.
"It was super casual," Ben says. "It was just like, 'okay, yeah so we're going to take this now.'"
NPR found five other people in Illinois, Oregon and Minnesota who described similar occurrences in recent months. In statements made under oath as part of lawsuits against the Trump administration's handling of immigration enforcement, they said they were arrested, seemingly without provocation, while protesting ICE and then had officers take or try to take what appeared to be a sample of their DNA.
"Are six cases enough to be concerned as a pattern? I think yes, because history tells us that what law enforcement is permitted to do, they tend to do more of," says Erin Murphy, a law professor at New York University.
The federal government does have broad authority to take DNA from people it has arrested or who are facing charges. In fact, in a statement to NPR, a spokesperson for the Department of Homeland Security said federal law actually requires federal law enforcement to collect DNA samples from individuals arrested or facing charges.
But legal experts say that authority may be overly broad.
"What law enforcement would say is, 'these were people that were facing charges,'" Murphy says. "What are the charges they're facing if it's civil immigration authorities doing what seems to be unlawful interference with First Amendment rights? Even if that's the asserted basis, is that constitutional? I think the answer should be clearly no."
In 2013, the Supreme Court ruled that a Maryland state law that forced an arrested person to give their DNA to police was constitutional. But that case involved clear restrictions: It involved a law that required the arrest be for a serious crime, and the arrest had to be lawful, based on probable cause.
Orin Kerr, a law professor at Stanford University, says whether the arrest is lawful is the most pressing question at hand, when it comes to the DNA taken from ICE protesters.
"What you worry about is an officer making a decision in the field that a person committed a crime when they might not have. Maybe they were doing something protected under the First Amendment," Kerr says. "The officer says, 'I think you crossed the line, I'm going to arrest you.' It turns out the officer was wrong, but the DNA test has been conducted, and the information has been entered into the database. What then?"
Kerr says it's not immediately clear what the legal remedy might be for such a violation, though there are avenues to request the federal government expunge a DNA record.
NPR has found dozens of examples of people who said federal officers told them they were committing a crime while peacefully observing immigration activity, which civil rights lawyers say is constitutionally protected behavior.
Andrew Birrell, president of the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers, says he worries that gathering protesters' DNA could have a chilling effect on free speech.
"The Court was not imagining a First Amendment situation," Birrell says. "It's very concerning to me because what it looks like the government is doing is creating this catalog of political dissidents."
It's unclear where the samples acquired from protesters in recent months are ending up or how they're being used. DHS did not respond to NPR's questions about that. Administration officials have previously denied the existence of a database of protesters.
In the past, DNA specimens taken by federal immigration officers have been added to a national database maintained by the FBI, which many state and local law enforcement agencies can access. From 2020 to 2024, for instance, DHS took the DNA of more than 2,000 U.S. citizens, according to a report from Georgetown University. Those samples were added to that database.
Murphy, of NYU, says having the protesters' DNA samples in a centralized policing database is particularly troubling because genetic information is so sensitive. It's much more than a fingerprint.
"You're not just giving up some abstract stuff. You're giving up valuable information," she says.
DNA tests can reveal information about a person's ancestry, their risk for developing certain health conditions, and their likelihood of having certain personality traits. The fear, Murphy says, is that all that data could be weaponized – and that extends beyond the risk to a single person.
"You're taking their entire family tree going back in history," Murphy says. "And you're not just taking their DNA right in this moment in time, you're taking their children's DNA and their children's children's DNA."
In Minneapolis, Ben, the man tackled by ICE, was still in a lot of pain a few days after his arrest. He went to the hospital, where doctors found three broken ribs. His medical records, which NPR reviewed, say he suffered "blunt chest trauma." More than a month later, he still feels some pain, but says what's been more lasting is the psychological stress the whole ordeal caused.
"I don't really have the words for it," he says. "It's just not something that should have ever happened."
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