Could a 2005-era DNA collection law have prevented the death of a Maryland mother of five? It’s not out of the realm of possibilities, according to three federal whistleblowers included in an investigation posted to the social media platform X.

Catherine Herridge, an independent investigative journalist (Herridge was a longtime FOX News journalist and a CBS News reporter) published a report highlighting the lack of compliance from U.S. Customs and Border Protection with a 2005 law called the DNA Fingerprint Act. The law calls for migrants who are detained or arrested at the border to be swabbed for DNA and those samples are then sent to the FBI. The information is added to a database that can be used to match evidence in other crimes.

Migrants who are under the age of 14, or would reasonably be allowed into the United States, would not be swabbed for DNA.

In Herridge’s investigative report, she spoke with the whistleblowers, Michael Taylor, Fred Wynn and Mark Jones, about their concerns surrounding the noncompliance with the DNA Fingerprint Act.

“The willful noncompliance I believe is inexplicable,” Taylor told Herridge.

Rachel Morin was a mother of five and was found killed along the Ma and Pa trail in Bel Air in August 2023.

The suspected killer was later identified as El Salvador native Victor Antonio Hernandez-Martinez. Law enforcement authorities said Hernandez-Martinez fled his home country and is a suspect in homicide investigation there.

According to law enforcement authorities, Hernandez-Martinez attempted to illegally cross the U.S. border three times before successfully crossing around Feb. 13, 2023.

Hernandez-Martinez attempted to cross the southern border illegally on Jan. 19, 2023, near Santa Teresa, New Mexico. He was apprehended and expelled. Hernandez-Martinez attempted to cross again on Jan. 31, 2023, near El Paso, Texas. Again, he was expelled. And on Feb. 6, 2023, near the same town in New Mexico as his illegal crossing in January, Hernandez-Martinez was apprehended and again expelled under Title 42.

Title 42 was a public health order implemented in March 2020 by former President Donald Trump during the COVID-19 pandemic. It’s an emergency health order that allowed the U.S. to turn away migrants who came to the U.S.-Mexico border on the grounds of preventing the spread of COVID-19. The order expired in May 2023.

In a May 2023 report from the Government Accountability Office, U.S. Customs and Border Protection claimed the Department of Homeland Security launched a program to collect DNA samples nationwide. But the GAO notes there’s not enough data to determine success, and a footnote indicates that CBP does “not collect DNA from individuals it expelled from the country under Title 42.”

However, just because CBP doesn’t require the DNA samples to be collected from those expelled under Title 42, it doesn’t mean it’s prohibited, according to sources FOX45 News spoke with who are familiar with the process. That means had a DNA sample been taken from Hernandez-Martinez, his information may have been flagged as a suspect connected to the El Salvador murder investigation, and it would have popped up as a match following a March 2023 sexual assault in Los Angeles. Police in LA say Hernandez-Martinez assaulted a woman and a young girl there, less than six months before traveling to Maryland where now, police say he killed Morin.

“Are you alleging that homeland security’s failure to comply with the DNA collection law may have been a contributing factor in Rachel Morin’s death,” Herridge asked the whistleblowers.

“It may have been a contributing factor, yes,” Wynn said.

“We understand there were three bites at the apple with this subject and never took it,” Jones added.

In February 2024, Iowa Republican Sen. Chuck Grassley sent a letter to the U.S. Customs and Border Protection demanding to know why the DNA Fingerprint Act isn’t being followed, and what’s being done to improve compliance. The letter notes that by the third quarter of fiscal year 2023, the FBI received DNA samples from 37% of migrants from encounters at the border.

And in July 2024, Grassley chaired a Senate hearing on Capitol Hill with the three whistleblowers and asked about the impacts on national security of the noncompliance.

“Do we know if we could have absolutely prevented Rachel Morin’s rape and murder? We don’t know that sir,” Jones said during the congressional hearing. “But we do know that if we were able to identify the subject earlier, he would have been on law enforcement’s radar and potentially apprehended.”

“We are allowing investigative leads to get past us and we’re frankly violating the very law that was passed by Congress in 2006 and implemented by the Department of Justice law enforcement entities in 2009. So, the impact is clear,” Jones said.

Meanwhile, Herridge told FOX45 News via a statement that the whistleblowers told her and her team the DNA “that has been collected, as required by law, presumptively solved over 1,000 cases including cold cases.”

Herridge said the DNA collection takes about 30 seconds, according to the whistleblowers, and the test kits cost $4. She added that the story “has always been about much more than government bureaucracy. It’s about the human cost.”

“This is where politics or personal bias may come into play,” Herridge said via a statement to FOX45 News. “Rachel Morin’s murder haunts the whistleblowers because, they say, if the DNA law had been followed, there was a chance to identify, then detain the suspect before he traveled to Maryland and the 37-year-old mother of five would be alive today.”

A spokesperson for CBP told FOX45 News it is working on a response to questions about Hernandez-Martinez’s apprehensions.