The Shock Doctrine, Delivered by Hand: DHS Files to Buy $20 Million in Pain for ICE
A new procurement notice would arm immigration officers with wearable electric-shock devices, activated invisibly by the press of a wrist button. It arrives after a year in which ICE has killed U.S. citizens, deported lawful residents, and quietly ignored the body cameras Congress already paid for.
On Monday, August 10, the Department of Homeland Security quietly slid a procurement notice onto its contracting portal. The document does not use the word “weapon.” Instead, it authorizes Immigration and Customs Enforcement to spend up to $20 million on what DHS calls a “Conductive Distraction and De-escalation Device” — a glove that emits an electric shock the moment its wearer presses a button on the wrist and touches another person’s skin. The device, made by a Kentucky firm called Compliant Technologies, would make ICE the first federal agency in the country to deploy it. Delivery is scheduled by March 31, 2027.
That paperwork was filed while the bodies were still being counted. According to Human Rights Watch, 52 people died in ICE custody during the first 500 days of Donald Trump’s second term — a mortality rate more than double what it was under the Biden administration and nearly four times the rate of Trump’s own first term. Three U.S. citizens have been shot dead by federal immigration agents during the same period. The body cameras that DHS promised in February have still not reached most officers in the field. And now, before any of those problems has been meaningfully addressed, the agency is buying pain.
I. The Device Itself
The G.L.O.V.E. — an acronym for Generated Low Output Voltage Emitter — looks, until it is used, like an ordinary black patrol glove. A small button on the wrist activates the electrical circuit. On contact with exposed skin, the device delivers a pulse of up to 380 volts, sufficient to disrupt coordinated muscle movement and, per the manufacturer’s marketing, produce compliance within roughly three seconds. Unlike a taser, the device leaves no prongs, produces no visible arc, and generates no audible discharge. The pain is real; the evidence a shock occurred at all is not.
NPR, which obtained a copy of Compliant Technologies’ customer list at a school-safety conference last year, found the device already in use at more than fifty police departments across roughly twenty states, along with prisons, jails, and hospitals. But no federal law-enforcement agency has ever deployed it. ICE would be the first — under a no-bid contract, on a compressed timeline, and with no public rule specific to the device governing when, on whom, or for how long officers may activate it.
The manufacturer’s own user manual, according to CNN and CBS, imposes limits: no more than two gloves applied at once, no application longer than fifteen seconds in most circumstances, and no use against children, pregnant women, older adults, or people with disabilities. Yet immigration officers in the field frequently cannot know, in the seconds before a takedown, which of those categories a person belongs to. The rules that would matter most are the rules least likely to be honored — and the manufacturer that wrote them will not be in the room when they are broken.
“A recipe for more harm to the public and less accountability.”
— Jenn Rolnick Borchetta · ACLU Deputy Project Director for Policing
II. The Bodies Already Counted
The most damning context for this procurement is not the device itself but the record of the year that preceded it. In the eighteen months since Trump returned to office, immigration enforcement has produced a fatality record that no rational agency would answer with additional weapons.
The National Immigration Project reports at least 24 deaths in ICE custody through early August of this year alone — a pace on track to exceed 2025, itself the deadliest year for immigration detention in more than two decades. NBC News has documented 14 people shot by federal immigration officers between September 2025 and February 2026, including two U.S. citizens killed in Minneapolis in a single month: Renée Nicole Good, a 37-year-old mother of three, and Alex Pretti, a 37-year-old ICU nurse. Both were killed by agents firing into moving vehicles — a tactic that policing experts have spent decades trying to eliminate from American law enforcement.
In July, two more men were killed in the space of a week: Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, a Mexican national in Houston, and Miguel Ángel Durán Guerrero, a 25-year-old Colombian delivery driver in Biddeford, Maine, who according to the Maine Immigrants’ Rights Coalition was legally authorized to work in the United States. His three-year-old daughter, still in her Bluey pajamas, arrived to find his body on the pavement. In neither shooting was any officer wearing a body camera, because DHS still has not deployed the equipment nationwide despite pledges dating back to February.
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III. Rules Written in Invisible Ink
Every defense DHS has offered for the glove purchase rests on the assumption that officers will follow proper procedure. A department spokesperson told multiple outlets that ICE personnel are “highly trained in de-escalation” and that any new technology is reviewed for compliance with law-enforcement policies. But it is precisely on the questions of training, review, and compliance that this administration has failed most publicly.
Naureen Shah, the ACLU’s director of policy for immigration, has pointed out that ICE has hired more than 12,000 officers in under a year — a hiring surge driven by White House pressure to hit 2,000 arrests per day. Handing a novel and dangerous device to agents with limited training and a documented record of misusing force is, in her words, reckless. Jenn Rolnick Borchetta of the ACLU has added a subtler concern: unlike a taser, which produces a visible discharge and audible report, the glove works silently and invisibly. A shock delivered from a closed fist looks, to any bystander or supervisor, indistinguishable from a punch that connected. The device is a surveillance-defeating weapon disguised as a de-escalation tool.
Meanwhile, the promise of body cameras — the one accountability measure the administration has publicly embraced — remains largely unmet. Congress allocated $20 million in fiscal 2026 for body cameras, an amount matched, dollar for uncomfortable dollar, by the glove request. Six months after former Secretary Kristi Noem’s February pledge to “rapidly” deploy cameras nationwide, the officers involved in the Houston and Maine killings still weren’t wearing them. Noem was fired in March and replaced by former Sen. Markwayne Mullin of Oklahoma; despite the change in leadership, the deployment schedule remains vague and the equipment remains largely undistributed.
“So sadistic and cruel that it delights in buying gloves that shock people.”
— Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.)
IV. The Line ICE Has Already Crossed
DHS’s assurance that the gloves are meant to be used only against people it describes as “criminal illegal aliens” collapses under the weight of the agency’s own record. ICE has arrested and detained U.S. citizens — including George Retes, a military veteran, during the Camarillo raid. It has deported lawful residents, including Jessica Treviño, a Texas mother of three whose DACA status was terminated over an “unauthorized travel” designation despite a clean record. It has shot and killed Americans who committed no immigration offense at all. The categorical assurance that this device will be pointed only at a specific class of people has no support in the agency’s actual conduct over the past eighteen months.
Rep. Maxwell Frost of Florida framed the objection with unusual bluntness on the House floor: an agency that has spent the year attacking and killing people in the streets is not one that should be trusted with new weapons of any kind. Rep. Shontel Brown of Ohio called the plan the product of an out-of-control agency operating on what she described as a limitless taxpayer subsidy from Trump and the Republican Congress. Kica Matos, president of the National Immigration Law Center, called the procurement “disgusting and barbaric.”
The manufacturer explicitly warns against using the glove on children, on pregnant women, on the elderly, on people with disabilities. But when masked federal agents descend on a farm, a courthouse hallway, or a suburban street, they do not check medical histories first. The people who will be shocked will inevitably include the people the device was never supposed to touch — including U.S. citizens whose citizenship, in ICE’s operational practice of the past year, has proven no protection at all. That is not a hypothetical failure mode. It is the observed pattern of the past eighteen months, now projected forward into a new tool designed to make it easier.
A President Who Escalates Where Any Rational Leader Would Correct
The Twenty-Fifth Amendment’s Section 4, ratified in 1967 in the wake of the Kennedy assassination, addresses a specific danger: a president who cannot or will not discharge the duties of the office, at a moment when the Vice President together with a majority of the Cabinet — or a body designated by Congress — is willing to say so in writing. Section 4 has never been formally invoked. But its framers understood that “inability” is not only medical. It also encompasses a chief executive whose decisions consistently produce foreseeable harm and who refuses to correct course when the harm is documented in front of him.
On April 14, 2026, Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.), the ranking member of the House Judiciary Committee and a constitutional-law professor, introduced legislation with 50 Democratic co-sponsors to establish a Commission on Presidential Capacity to Discharge the Powers and Duties of Office — the 17-member congressional body that Section 4 explicitly contemplates but that Congress has never bothered to create. Sens. Ed Markey (D-Mass.) and Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.) and Reps. Sydney Kamlager-Dove, Eric Swalwell, Yassamin Ansari, and Maxwell Frost have all publicly urged invocation. In an open letter to Congress in April, four psychiatrists warned that Trump’s behavior had crossed a threshold demanding immediate bipartisan attention.
The constitutional argument connecting Section 4 to the glove procurement is this: a president fit for the office does not respond to a documented year of citizen deaths, deported lawful residents, and unfulfilled accountability pledges by ordering $20 million in additional pain-delivery devices. He orders a stand-down. He orders an investigation. He orders the body cameras Congress has already funded. Escalation in the face of a mounting record of harm — the refusal to correct where any reasonable executive would correct — is itself evidence of the very incapacity the Amendment was written to address.
The practical barriers are undeniable and worth naming honestly. Vice President Vance and the current Cabinet are Trump loyalists unlikely to invoke Section 4 against the man who chose them. Republican majorities in both chambers make Raskin’s commission bill effectively dead on arrival, and even were it passed, it could be vetoed by the very president it seeks to examine. Sen. Whitehouse himself has acknowledged the moment is not politically ripe, urging Democrats to focus on the ballot box.
But the moral and constitutional case is not extinguished by political impossibility. The Amendment exists precisely because the framers of 1967 knew that constitutional mechanisms sometimes fail their moment — and that the record of that failure matters historically even when it does not deliver an immediate remedy. To name the incapacity, to file the bill, to record the votes, to preserve the argument in the public record: these are the things a functioning opposition does even when the arithmetic is against it. Silence in this moment is not prudence. It is complicity.
Editorial Conclusion
A functioning government does not respond to the deaths of its own citizens by buying weapons to deliver more pain. It does not distribute shock devices to officers whose body cameras are still sitting in warehouses. It does not celebrate a “de-escalation” tool engineered to inflict punishment invisibly and without record. The G.L.O.V.E. procurement is not a policy failure — it is a declaration. What this administration has chosen to escalate, and what it has chosen to leave uncorrected, tells the country everything it needs to know about whose safety this government is built to protect and whose it has decided to spend. The Twenty-Fifth Amendment was written for exactly this kind of leadership. Congress has a constitutional duty to say so — out loud, on the record — even when the votes to act on it are not yet there.
Sources & References
- CNN — ICE plans to spend up to $20 million on electrical shock gloves for agents
- NPR — ICE to buy electric shock gloves to help with arrests
- CBS News — ICE plans to give officers gloves that can deliver electric shocks
- The Hill — DHS unveils plans for ICE electric-shock gloves
- Common Dreams — “Sadistic and Cruel”: Democratic Lawmakers Rail Against $20 Million for ICE’s Electric Shock Gloves
- Axios — ICE to equip officers with electric shock gloves designed to inflict pain
- PBS NewsHour — ICE’s plan to give officers electric shock gloves draws outrage and fears of misuse
- Human Rights Watch — Dying in Detention: Rising Deaths in an Expanding US Immigration Detention System
- NBC News — List: ICE and Border Patrol shootings as Trump doubles down on immigration enforcement
- CNN — Lack of body cameras on ICE agents fuels more uncertainty over fatal shootings
- Newsweek — ICE to Require Body Cameras During Vehicle Stops Following Fatal Encounters
- American Immigration Council — 6 Deaths in ICE Custody and 2 Fatal Shootings: A Horrific Start to 2026
- National Immigration Project — Mourning Those Who Have Died in ICE Custody
- The New Republic — Democrats Formally File 25th Amendment Bill to Get Rid of Trump
- Common Dreams — Raskin Bill Would Create Commission to Examine President’s Fitness
- The Hill — Raskin introduces bill to assess president’s fitness under 25th Amendment
- Yahoo News / BBC — Footage shows US citizen shot dead by ICE agent in Texas traffic stop
- The Appeal — Deaths in Detention Warn of Horrors Behind ICE’s Prison Walls
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