For many years, America’s immigration laws have required CBP officers who arrest or detain criminal illegal aliens to collect DNA samples from them and enter that information into a national tracking database. It’s an important safeguard, allowing repeat offenders to be quickly identified and (hopefully) either imprisoned or removed from the country. But a few years ago, three whistleblowers came forward to report that in many cases these samples were not being collected. A lengthy investigation revealed that this shortcoming allowed many known criminals to be released into the country where many committed new, serious offenses. To make matters worse, rather than quickly moving to amend their practices to address this shortcoming, CBP retaliated against the whistleblowers, dealing them professional and financial setbacks. (NY Post)

US Customs and Border Protection retaliated for years against three whistleblowers who called out its failure to collect DNA from millions of detainees, allowing some violent criminals to evade justice for decades, a federal investigation found.

Fred Wynn, Mark Taylor and Mike Jones faced professional and financial consequences for spotlighting their agency’s refusal to comply with federal law enforcement rules for DNA collection on criminal arrestees since 2009, according to the US Office of Special Counsel (OSC).

“The agency’s noncompliance with the law has allowed subject subsequently accused of violent crimes, including homicide and sexual assault, to elude detection even when detained multiple times by CBP or Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE),” Special Counsel Henry Kerner told then-President Donald Trump and Congress in letters on Aug. 21, 2019.

So how many people are we talking about here? By one investigator’s estimate, there were at least five million illegal aliens detained over the past decade who did not have DNA samples collected and cataloged. Many of these aliens went on to be convicted of violent crimes including sexual assault and murder. One official familiar with the investigation told The Post that the number of people killed by these uncataloged migrants “probably exceeds the number of Americans who died on 9/11.”

Some may say (correctly) that there are simply too many people being encountered to collect DNA samples from them all, test them, and catalog all the results. It’s a massive undertaking that would require a huge amount of manpower and likely generate a backlog that would stretch on for years. But that doesn’t mean that the work isn’t still critical. It also highlights the undeniable fact that we’re facing this gap in vital law enforcement data precisely because the border has been left open and millions of anonymous migrants have been invited into the country by Joe Biden. This is a manufactured crisis and its author resides in the White House, not in CBP.

But no matter how great and obvious the need may be to collect DNA samples from all apprehended migrants and fill out a comprehensive database, no amount of wishing will make the required materials and manpower appear out of thin air. You can match a suspect’s DNA against a criminal database in as little as four hours, so it’s an amazingly useful technology. But even using Rapid DNA Analysis, it takes up to two hours to collect and process each sample. That means that using a single test station, even working 24 hours per day, it would take nearly 23 years just to test and catalog just the roughly 100,000 migrants currently in New York City.

So as with so many aspects of the Biden border crisis, we are facing yet another problem with no realistic solution. None of this excuses the CBP’s decision to retaliate against the whistleblowers, but pointing fingers doesn’t bring us any closer to addressing this issue and solving the problem. There is, of course, an obvious solution available, but that would involve finishing the construction of the border wall, shutting down the flow of migrants, and deporting the ones who have already been released into the country. But the Biden administration obviously won’t be doing that. The next (hopefully Republican) president must take action, however. And it wouldn’t hurt to run DNA tests on all of them before they are shipped out. That will make it far easier to detect them if they slip back in.