Washington DC - President Donald Trump's administration is reportedly collecting the DNA information of migrants and collating them into a national criminal database.

US Customs and Border Patrol is conducting a "massive expansion of genetic surveillance," by collecting the DNA profile of migrants in a searchable database for law enforcement, an expert told the Guardian.

An FBI database known as the Combined DNA Index System (Codis) is used by law enforcement to identify suspects of crime using DNA samples. It is a system predominantly built for convicted sex offenders and violent criminals.

The database is usually updated with the DNA records of those accused of felonies, but a report by Wired revealed that migrant children and teenagers without documentation are among those whose data has been added.

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Per the report, more than 133,000 children and teenagers have had their genetic data added to the national criminal database. At least one child was only four years old.

Records of this DNA database were quietly released by CBP earlier this year, leading experts to sound the warning about the risk of extensive profiling if such systems are not heavily regulated.

"In order to secure our borders, CBP is devoting every resource available to identify who is entering our country," CBP's assistant commissioner of public affairs Hilton Beckham told Wired in a statement.

"We are not letting human smugglers, child sex traffickers and other criminals enter American communities."

Stevie Glaberson of Georgetown University's Law Center on Privacy and Technology said that putting a four-year-old's data into Codis is "not immigration enforcement. That's genetic surveillance."

Glaberson published a report alongside colleagues last year detailing how US authorities were at that time already using immigration laws to amass DNA records for use in "future policing."

"The program reinforces harmful narratives about immigrants and intensifies existing policing practices that target immigrant communities and communities of color, making us all less safe," Emerald Tse, one of the report's co-authors, said in a statement.

"The government’s DNA collection program represents a massive expansion of genetic surveillance and an unjustified invasion of privacy."