DHS to start DNA testing to establish family relationships on the border | Hacker News Reader

DHS to start DNA testing to establish family relationships on the border

cnn.com

101 pointshoward941114 comments

Those who do genetic testing in the clinic know that, far more frequently than expected, family relations do not line up exactly as the genetic inheritance happens. Clinicians go to great lengths to avoid damaging families with these revelations. I have a feeling that such ethics will not be brought to these situations by DHS.

I think damaging families is the point of this policy.

The point of this policy is to identify real familial relations with those crossing the border.

At the border there are instances of individuals using children to get special preference. The proposed idea will mitigate this issue.

This makes a lot of presumptuous about the intention of the adults here. Do you know that these are not something similar to adoptive parents?!

Can you define "real familial relations" purely by DNA? I don't think so, what about adoptions or surrogates?

This just seems like a policy that can be used to discriminate against people who don't fit a chosen definition of "family".

Or it can be used to expedite the clearance of real families instead of subjecting everyone to the same questioning methods.

> real families

That's... still discriminating against people who don't fit a chosen definition of "family"

But then they won’t be claiming “this is my daughter/son”...

They’re trying to filter against bogus claims.

And people with adoptive children will say what, exactly?

Presumably they can provide papers to the effect. Just as if I were to claim asylum in any other place.

Also, I’m sure they have rates of these things and if it starts getting higher than the norm it could prompt more scrutiny.

People fleeing for their lives may not have access to paperwork. In fact, the authorities denying people access to paperwork- such as birth records and legal status- is almost certainly evidence for approving an asylum claim in the first place.

Do you think the instances “fleeing” is the bulk of the cases? Mostly it’s economic migrants. We know if they were fleeing they could just stay in Mexico or if not from The Americas, in a neighboring country.

Also, in many of those countries there isn’t a tradition of adoption, so that would be pretty rare.

It's not that uncommon.

> Many of the migrants are asylum seekers fleeing political violence in their countries of origin, especially Congo and Cameroon. Many of the Congolese lived for years in Angola, where they learned enough Portuguese to get by in Spanish. Angola last year expelled more than 300,000 Congolese refugees.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/the_americas/hundreds-o...

Angola is one of the up and coming countries in Africa. That people are leaving it indicates it’s more an economic calculus than persecution.

> The destruction in Kapende, where no house remains occupied or intact, marked the culmination of three days of violence in Lucapa, a sprawling mining town in the northeast surrounded by some of the world’s richest diamond fields.

> About 300,000 Congolese have fled Angola in the last few weeks, many of them in response to the violence in Lucapa at the beginning of October.

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-angola-drc-violence-insig...

> Angola is one of the up and coming countries in Africa. That people are leaving it indicates it’s more an economic calculus than persecution

The US was the up-and-coming nation of the Western hemisphere for a long time while engaging in systematic persecution of blacks, Native Americans, and, at various times and places, other groups. Aggregate economic development and systematic persecution of selected groups which justifies flight in reasonable fear aren't mutually incompatible.

> Do you think the instances “fleeing” is the bulk of the cases?

By definition, it's 100% of the cases that would be legitimate before validating the family relationship.

Requiring papers to prove one's own identity and familial relationships is anathema to the traditions of Common Law.

Of course, this tradition is being undermined left and right for the sake of the convenience, prejudices, and the power to control, of the ruling classes. And we go along with it, because there are some defensible reasons for doing so.

It's why I prefer online services that allow users to pick their own names. Here, I'm logfromblammo, and that's all anybody needs to know about me. In contrast, on Facebook, the terms of service require me to link my account to the identity I use for official interactions with the government, which is in turn linked to the name my parents gave me at birth.

Without descending into the identity derpfest propagated by some right-leaning libertarians, controlling my own identity means that it is more difficult to hurt me by hacking documents linked to my government identity. The more private businesses use the government identity exclusively, the more identity fraud and identity theft can become a problem.

This type of DNA-collecting dragnet reinforces the paradigm "you are who the government/company/computer says you are" over "you are who you claim to be". Getting sent to the vice principal's office to be disciplined for something that another person, enrolled at my high school with the same name as mine, had done is as close as I ever want to get to that. I got yelled at, for their mistake in identification. I am the only person who can really be sure that I am me, and I don't trust others not to screw that up--because they keep on screwing it up.

Asking for someone's "papers" to prove anything is never going to be something I could support unconditionally. Whenever you do that, you're taking away someone's agency to be in control of their own life.

Not all adoptions are "official" and "have papers," especially adoptions by people who are fleeing their country. I would argue that most adoptions in so-called "third world countries" are probably unofficial.

That’s possible but also adoptions aren’t as common as in the US. I’ve had conversations with people from some of these areas and adoption is hardly considered as an option to adding to a family.

Huh? You have an extremely narrow view of adoption, I would assume most "unofficial" adoptions are by circumstance, not a generic desire to add to the family.

I'm an adoptive parent in the US and I've been waiting months for that paperwork........

There will certainly be some guys traveling with a child they believe to be theirs. Until the test comes back.

Won’t most the cases be either mother-child or mother-(adult male)-child? I don’t see father-child being the predominant grouping.

Good to know that adoptions aren't "real." So if a kid's parent dies and they're living with an aunt, that's not "real" and the government is free to tear the child's remaining family away and replace it with rape and imprisonment.

Way to mitigate the issue. Damn the consequences.

adoptions have a paper trail.

Not a given, particularly for people fleeing countries in crisis, disarray, or violent turmoil. Or if a parent died during the migration, etc.

> if a parent died during the migration

so if a parent dies any rando in the caravan can claim the child and get all the attached benefits? gee, wonder if that kind of reward would have side effects on the safety of migrants with children.

What "benefits" are you talking about?

Migrants at the border are handled with different policies if they arrive with children rather than alone

Births don't even have a paper trail in much of the world.

Do non-familial adoptions actually happen in any sort of significant numbers in central american countries?

I'd actually like to know if blended families occur more often than "child recycling". (Blended Families == adoption, divorce and remarriage, godfathering/godmothering, other culturally normatized familial-like relationships that aren't necessarily accepted as a "nuclear family"...)

(Disclaimer: I have no real opinions on this, but I'd like to get the facts.)

It would mitigate this issue to an extent, but also introduces new challenges (for instance and as pointed to elsewhere: dealing with officially/unofficially adopted children). I'm not sure if there are published numbers on what fraction of adult asylum seekers are attempting to use children in this way, but the preoccupation with "solving" this particular issue demonstrates that either (a) that fraction is disturbingly high or (b) we'd like to make the process even more complicated for no particularly good reason. The trend of every policy along the border seems to suggest that (b) is more likely, which is upsetting.

It's to prevent "Child Recycling" which is trafficking children across the border to claim asylum then trafficking them back to accompany a new group of migrants.

read the comment you replied to again.

hint: it won't be effective at that.

Do you think that actually happens.

It's been my experience that anything that can be conceived of does or will actually happen but I'd be surprised if this were a common occurrence.

On the other hand, we are talking about desperate people frequently traveling under the guidance of notoriously callous border traffickers so what do I know...

I have no data, but I'd wager it's way more common to see any of the following: adoption, people raised by non-blood relatives, paternity not being what was thought -- all while being innocent, law abiding people.

> From October 2017 to February 2018, there was a 315 percent increase in the number of cases of adults with minors fraudulently posing as “family units” to gain entry.

So does that mean it was 5 cases and now it’s 21?

You don't need DNA or familial tracking for that. A biometric would do, since that would catch the child traveling under two different identities.

Of course, with DNA testing you could catch them the first time around, rather than have to wait for a biometric read on the second (or third) trafficking.

Or establish without a doubt that someone cheated or was adopted. The biometric is far less intrusive and damaging.

No, it’s to drive public money to the charlatans selling the tests, without any regard for perceived or actual threat to public safety.

This is going to cause harm, it will not accomplish its purpose, and the charlatans will be laughing all the way to the bank.

Would you mind reviewing the site guidelines and following them here? They include:

"Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive."

We're trying to avoid flamewars on Hacker News, because they're predictable, therefore uninteresting, therefore off topic (see https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html). Plus they bring out meanness and dumbness in people and get worse as they go along.

this has nothing to do with being correct.

there's a rush by law enforcement to create a DNA database.

and if you did at a clinic or 23and me et al, be sure that your dna plus some metadata (if not from you, from your payment or from the lab, anything that goes around hippa is game) is already cataloged there.

couple months ago a newspaper shown how cheap private investigators paid for this data to narrow down location of people they were paid to locate.

Sometimes I feel like I'm too paranoid but then these things keep happening that seemed like they would happen years ago which uselessly vindicates my position. Is there some critical threshold where they have enough DNA data to track everyone not in the database? Maybe any amount is helpful since it narrows a pool down.

Why do people keep giving out their information so freely?

We don't believe it could happen here.

The recent use of DNA-based ancestry sites' genealogical data to solve cold cases would suggest we're not far off.

[1]: https://www.newscientist.com/article/2167554-serial-killer-s...

[2]: https://broadly.vice.com/en_us/article/9kpnnz/linda-ann-okee...

[3]: https://www.bostonglobe.com/metro/2019/02/19/maine-man-accus...

For white people, at least.

https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2018/10/golden-s...

> Then the researchers built a model that predicted that a database needs to include only 2 percent of a population for 90 percent of the people to have a third-cousin match or closer in it. In other words, a database of just a few million people could be sufficient to track down nearly everyone in the United States....Another pattern jumped out in the MyHeritage data: People of primarily northern European ancestry were more likely to have matches than people of primarily sub-Saharan ancestry. This reflects the predominantly white customer base for MyHeritage and most other direct-to-consumer DNA tests. It also means that genetic-genealogy searches by law enforcement are, for now, more likely to succeed with people of European descent.

These sorts of identifications actually require a lot of manual work by genetic genealogists tracing ancestry after a potential relative is found in a DNA database. For example, Barbara Rae-Venter lead a team of five people to identify the Golden State Killer.

BTW, there's a handy Wikipedia page for a list of suspects identified using the GEDMatch database

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_suspected_perpetrators...

> there's a rush by law enforcement to create a DNA database. True, But this has nothing to do with that (at least at this point). TFA specifically stated that no data would be retained, they are just looking for results in 90 minutes, evidently to verify if someone claims parenthood of a child, they really are the parent.

If it is actually used to make human trafficing more difficult, it is a good thing.

(Don't ask me whether I trust this administration to do anything good, for the right reasons, within reasonable bounds, with proper controls, or merely act with sanity and respect -- that is a whole other conversation likely unsuitable for this forum)

>(at least at this point) Everything is incremental

"If <policy> makes <bad thing> harder, it is a good thing" is the wax on the runners of the sled flying down the slippery slope.

It's fallacious to frame handing more power to centralizing entities solely in terms of the good they may (possibly) do. There are always downsides, even in addition to direct misuse - eg 1000 lifetimes lost every year to the TSA alone.

It's always a trade off, and politics (aka willful ignorance) practically guarantees it won't be made for the right reasons.

True.

Which is why I put the disclaimers in the last two paragraphs ("If it is actually used" and "Don't ... trust this administration...")

The restricting scope, application purpose, and effective oversight are the anchor points and crampons that enable us to not slide down the slippery slope, but get to the top.

I don't think it will make enough of a difference to justify the totalitarian aspects. I imagine relatives are already complicit in a decent amount of human trafficking cases.

Is there a way to get them to delete your data?

This is the slippery slope that started with the idea of DNA testing criminals only.

> I have a feeling that such ethics will not be brought to these situations by DHS.

I'm picturing the president hosting a daytime talk show "who's the father" episode.

FTA: "The information collected in the DNA test will not be stored or shared, the ICE official said."

Now, whether or not this is true...

Not to mention questions about how reliable this quick fix DNA testing is. False negatives will happen and destroy families in the process.

Because I guess adoptions, or family relationships a little more complicated than the nuclear family don't exist.

> From October 2017 to February 2018, there was a 315 percent increase in the number of cases of adults with minors fraudulently posing as “family units” to gain entry.

Gotta wonder what that comes out to as a percentage of all people trying to gain entry.

The statement also implies that DHS is already determining what is a "family unit" without DNA. Gotta wonder what their algorithm is there too...

Separate 'parents' from children, ask children if those are really their parents?

So no children from prior relationships, no adoptions, no same sex couples, ...

What will happen to adopted children?

Presumably they'll be abducted, detained, and deported.

I'd put a huge asterisk next to "deported" in this case.

Oh yes, separated and put in cages should be more precise

Like these ones? https://www.businessinsider.com/migrant-children-in-cages-20...

It's wrong no matter who does it.

Just would like to see people be honest and admit that it was not only Trump that "put kids in cages" and there's entirely legitimate reasons to put kids in temporary holding while sorting out their immigration situation.

Why does it matter what people were doing before?

they don't have any power, only the current president. Claiming Obama did it, and Obama was Jesus, so it must have been good, sounds really strange coming from the group who claim Obama is the antichrist

Hopefully their guardians won't cross the border illegally and put them in that situation.

People looking for asylum are not crossing the border illegally.

Except for the people who only claim asylum after they cross illegally and are caught as a means to delay deportation.

The comment you replied to is asking “what happens to adopted children”. Strangely enough crossing the border legally doesn’t magically result in your adopted children getting new DNA. So claiming that “illegal immigrants” won’t put their children in that position is beyond stupid. The question is how does this impact legal immigrants.

This is sampling at actual border crossing. So all the actual families crossing are victimized in order to punish brown people. Because none of this is being done on the northern border, despite Canadians living illegally in the US generally taking higher paying jobs than migrant workers from Mexico and Central America

From the article: "DHS has repeatedly warned that children are being exploited by traffickers to skirt the nation's immigration laws."

So it seems to me that it has to do with people skirting the law and exploiting children, not to "punish brown people".

> Because none of this is being done on the northern border, despite Canadians living illegally in the US generally taking higher paying jobs than migrant workers from Mexico and Central America.

Have stats on the number of Candadian's crossing the border illegally each year? I'd bet its an order of magnitude less than our southern border.

> And then we get to the real crux: as numerous people have said, this incorrectly classifies normal families as not being families.

Which is a problem, but this should be used as a tool in conjunction with other records and interviews of the family crossing.

Think of it this way, if a family crosses with children, takes the DNA test and everything is confirmed then the process may go much faster as additional investigation would not be needed.

isn't crossing the border without a visa a civil matter, not "illegal" ?

It's still illegal. It's just a misdemeanor, not a felony.

thanks, I've always been confused on that one.

A vacation to the USA could get French people around the paternity test ban

Living in a cyberpunk dystopia is much less pleasant than reading about fictional ones.

What CNN conveniently didn't tell you was that this kind of screening was all planned under the Obama administration. It's so convenient to post a picture of Trump at the top of the article to suggest it was all his idea.

Fuck CNN, it is a shitty fake news site.

Why is this even news since it started under the Obama administration?

Center for Immigration Studies article below.

https://cis.org/Rush/Expanded-Central-American-Refugee-Progr...

>The program's numerous conditions (DNA tests, background checks, medical clearance, etc.) dissuaded some from applying. More importantly, the majority of the Salvadoran, Guatemalan, and Honduran immigrants present in the U.S. are here illegally, which makes them ineligible to participate. This explains why, since the CAM program started almost three years ago, the U.S. received only 9,500 applications.

Some more news with statistics.

https://www.cbp.gov/newsroom/stats/sw-border-migration

Reading your links, I couldn't find any numbers for how many children were DNA tested while Obama was in office? How many was it? or did this launch under the Trump administration?

I'm unclear about what's "fake news"

that dna testing children is bad? From your comment, it sounds like you think Obama is infallible, and so anything he did must have been the best, most moral option possible.

or that the blame should be on Obama? but that doesn't make sense, because Trump held all the branches of government for 2 years, and didn't rescind this, when most of his presidency has been about undoing everything Obama did.

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