Picture a standard pair of black patrol gloves. Now picture a switch on the wrist. Flip it, press the glove against someone’s skin, and it sends an electrical pulse through them — enough pain to make them stop whatever they’re doing and comply.
The Trump administration wants to put thousands of these on the hands of ICE agents, at a cost of up to $20 million.
They’re called the G.L.O.V.E. — Generated Low Output Voltage Emitter — made by a Kentucky outfit called Compliant Technologies. Per the AP, ICE is chasing what could be a no-bid contract worth $10 to $20 million, running potentially into 2027. And the sheer size of that buy tells you everything: this isn’t a niche gadget for a handful of tactical guys. AP reports ICE may be looking to strap these onto most or all of its officers.
I’m a former cop, and I’m not reflexively against less-lethal tools. Give me a choice between an officer shooting somebody and an officer using a device that causes temporary pain without lasting injury, and I’ll take the less-lethal option every single time. That’s not a close call.
And that’s essentially the administration’s pitch. Border czar Tom Homan went on Fox and framed the gloves as one more rung on the ladder before deadly force — cops can’t leap from zero to a hundred, so slot this in alongside pepper spray and Tasers as another way to end a fight without a bullet. ICE says it’s still writing policy and training, so the gloves aren’t hitting the street tomorrow.
Fine. On paper, that’s a real argument. Here’s why it falls apart in practice.
A less-lethal weapon is exactly as safe as three things: the rules for when you’re allowed to use it, the training of the person wearing it, and the accountability that lands afterward if they screw up.
And we’re talking about ICE.
Right now, ICE is already buried in use-of-force questions. According to numbers the agency gave Congress last month, there have been 56 excessive-force complaints since the administration began its crackdown. Out of all 56, lawmakers say exactly one officer was even referred for possible discipline — with no confirmation that discipline actually happened. At least 10 people have died in encounters with immigration agents during this push, and recent fatal shootings in Maine and Texas have only sharpened the questions about training and oversight.
So this may not be the ideal moment to hand every agent a weapon that’s practically impossible to see.
And that invisibility is the crux of it. Point a Taser at someone and you can see the Taser. Deploy pepper spray and there’s residue and reaction. Swing a baton and the bodycam catches it. But this thing looks like a glove. An agent flips a switch on the wrist and delivers the current through plain skin contact — and AP reports that, unlike a Taser, it doesn’t leave burn marks or contact wounds. No probe, no barb, no trace.
That is precisely why civil-rights advocates are alarmed, and they’re right to be. Pain compliance has always demanded hard limits. You don’t get to hurt somebody because they’re irritating you. You don’t get to hurt somebody because they mouthed off. You don’t get to inflict pain as punishment because your ego took a hit.
Here’s the part that should stop everybody cold: the manufacturer’s own guidance says the device shouldn’t be used as punishment, shouldn’t be used for torture or horseplay, and shouldn’t be used just because somebody’s being verbally defiant. It even warns against using the gloves on high-risk groups — small children, pregnant women, the elderly, people with severe disabilities.
Now think about who ICE actually runs into on a daily basis. Families. Pregnant women. Older people. People with disabilities. People who don’t speak English. People who may genuinely not understand the command an agent is barking at them. And the agent laying hands on them might be wearing a glove that can shock.
What could go wrong? We don’t have to guess.
AP found a pending lawsuit over a 43-year-old man who died in 2024 after an encounter at a Kentucky jail where these gloves were used.
I’m going to be careful here, because the lawsuit does not establish that the gloves killed him. But according to court records AP reviewed, the man was allegedly shocked 27 times with the gloves and another 13 times with a Taser. An internal investigation found two of those glove applications ran 45 seconds and 99 seconds.
The manufacturer’s recommended maximum is 15 seconds.
That same internal review concluded the applications inflicted unnecessary pain and raised the risk of serious medical complications. AP found two other suits alleging glove-related injuries; both were dismissed.
And that’s the whole ballgame right there. You can write the most beautiful use-of-force policy in the history of law enforcement. The weapon can’t read it. The officer can. And the easier you make it to inflict pain, the more the oversight has to carry the weight.
Which brings me to the timing. ICE is rolling out body cameras nationwide, and that’s genuinely good — I’ve said for years that cameras protect the public and the cops, because they show when someone lies about an officer and they show when an officer blows it.
But ICE’s new policy says footage from serious incidents gets released promptly only when leadership decides it’s in the agency’s “best interests.” They can delay it. They can withhold it.
So put the two pieces together: a weapon that hurts people without leaving marks, handed out at the same moment the agency is reserving broad discretion over whether the public ever sees the footage of how it was used. That’s not an argument to ban the technology outright. It’s an argument to get some real answers before you drop $20 million on it.
What counts as enough resistance to justify activating it? How long can an agent hold it on someone? How many times? Does every single activation get automatically logged and reported as a use of force? Does the device keep its own electronic record? Will a supervisor review every deployment? What happens the first time it’s used on somebody who turns out to be a U.S. citizen? What happens when the person doesn’t speak English and never understood the order they’re supposedly refusing? And when an agent breaks the policy — who, exactly, is holding them accountable?
None of those are anti-cop questions. Those are the questions. They’re what you ask before you put a new weapon in anyone’s hands.
The company brands this a “conductive distraction and de-escalation device.” Words matter, so let’s be precise. De-escalation is talking somebody down. Creating distance. Slowing things. Calling for backup. Giving a person the room to comply on their own.
Electricity delivered through your hand is force. Maybe justified force. Maybe, in some situations, meaningfully safer than the alternatives. But it is force, and you should call it what it is.
Because there are absolutely scenarios where I can see the value — somebody actively fighting officers, somebody lunging for a weapon, somebody violently resisting inside a jail where the alternative is five guys dogpiling him or pepper spray in a closed room. Study it. Train for it. Write strict policy around it.
But ICE isn’t mainly a corrections agency managing violent inmates in a controlled building. Its agents are increasingly working parking lots, job sites, homes, and streets, as part of the biggest immigration enforcement operation in modern American history. That changes the entire equation.
Former acting ICE director John Sandweg warned the gloves are simply too easy to misuse on someone who poses no real threat. And a law professor who studies use of force raised the most human concern of all: when the weapon is literally attached to your hand, do you start reaching for it before trying anything gentler? That’s not cynicism. That’s behavior. If the tool’s already on, you’re more likely to use the tool.
When you’re talking about government agents with the power to detain people, load them into vehicles, and remove them from the country, “trust us” doesn’t cut it.
Maybe ICE eventually proves these gloves reduce injuries. Maybe they head off shootings. Maybe they spare somebody from getting slammed onto concrete. If the evidence shows that — and shows it’s safe — I’ll listen.
But you build the safeguards first. Require a report every time the electrical function fires. Require the bodycam to be rolling. Set hard limits on duration and repeat shocks. Make misuse a disciplinary offense with teeth. And release the footage when something goes wrong.
The question was never whether cops should have tools to safely control genuinely dangerous people. Of course they should. The question is whether we’re about to give thousands of federal agents the power to inflict invisible electric pain with a touch — and then ask the country to just trust they’ll use it right.
Given everything we’ve watched from ICE this past year, that is one hell of a lot of trust to ask for.
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