DHS says the shock glove is a de-escalation. Read the manual, and it reads like something else.
The Department of Homeland Security wants to hand ICE officers a glove that shocks people up to 380 volts on skin contact. Between $10 million and $20 million of taxpayer money, no-bid, out the door to a Kentucky company called Compliant Technologies before March 31, 2027 (AP; Washington Post).
The device has a friendly bureaucratic name: “Generated Low Output Voltage Emitter.” DHS calls it a “Conductive Distraction and De-escalation Device.” A U.S. Army fact sheet says it delivers “electrical pulses” to “gain compliance.” That is the whole thing right there, in that one verb. Compliance. It seems like DHS looks at me, citizens, and everyone, not ICE, as a threat. I still don’t have a coherent answer to why a manufactured immigration crisis is greater than healthcare, child welfare, and housing.
But, I see DHS has funds to procure weapons to administer more pain and injuries to people within our borders and city streets.
I served twenty-three years in uniform. I know what use-of-force training looks like when it is honest, and I know what it looks like when the paperwork is doing the honesty for you. This is the second one.
What the glove actually is
Compliant Technologies sells the CT-G5 as a normal-looking tactical glove. Flip the switch on the hand, and it becomes a weapon in one second. Voltage runs 324 to 362 volts, capped at 380. It has to touch bare skin. It leaves no burn mark (Compliant Technologies; AP). That last detail is not incidental. A weapon that hurts without leaving a photograph is a weapon built for a specific kind of encounter. And a specific kind of accountability problem: the one where the person who got hurt cannot prove it happened.
The manufacturer’s own manual tells you who this thing should not be used on: the elderly, small children, pregnant women, and the severely handicapped. The manual bars use “in response to verbal defiance,” and bars use for “punishment,” “torture,” or “horseplay” (AP).
Read that list twice. Then look at who ICE grabs off sidewalks, out of Home Depot parking lots, and out of driver-side windows every week in this country. The manufacturer has essentially written a warning label for the population DHS is about to hand these to.
What the glove has already done
Twenty-seven glove shocks. Thirteen Taser shocks. That is what a pending lawsuit says a 43-year-old man received in 2024 at the Madison County Detention Center in Richmond, Kentucky, before he died. An internal investigation found that two of the glove shocks lasted 45 seconds and 99 seconds. The manufacturer’s own recommended limit is 15 seconds. Court documents quote the investigation: “These actions not only inflicted unnecessary pain but also heightened the risk of serious health complications.” (AP).
Twenty-seven times. Ninety-nine seconds. A tool marketed as a quick “distraction” was used as a torture instrument on a man in custody. That is not a hypothetical. That is what this glove has already done inside a facility where the person could not walk away, could not resist, could not leave.
Now DHS wants to move it out of the jail and onto the street, where the person is a landscaper, a grandmother, a delivery driver, a kid on a bike, and where the encounter is not on camera the way a booking hallway is.
The DHS defense, translated
Here is what DHS actually said when asked to justify this:
“ICE is constantly assessing the needs of our officers in the field to ensure they have the tools and equipment necessary to safely arrest and remove criminal illegal aliens from our country.” (AP)
“Every decision is made with careful consideration and appropriately reviewed to ensure that any technology ICE utilizes is consistent with all applicable law enforcement policies and standards.” (AP)
Two paragraphs. Zero specifics. The statement does not name the device, describe the training, or cite the policy. It skips the Kentucky death entirely. It does not explain the no-bid contract; it does not explain why an agency that already carries firearms, Tasers, batons, pepper spray, and hands-on tactics needs one more pain compliance tool for people it is arresting, not fighting. Why are poor Americans the enemy? Racial profiling already targets people of color unfairly, making non-white people a target for shocking mistreatment.
Notice the phrase “criminal illegal aliens.” That is the trapdoor in the sentence. It lets the reader picture a violent felon. But ICE’s Enforcement and Removal Operations arrests a lot of people who have never been charged with anything except being here. The glove will not sit in a locker waiting for the imagined worst case. ICE will issue it to the officer for the ordinary case: the traffic stop, the courthouse hallway, the front-yard arrest. Ordinary is where misuse lives. And minorities are on the receiving end of batons, chokeholds, kneeling, and now, shock treatment.
What the professionals are saying
John Sandweg used to run ICE. He is not an activist; he is the former acting director of the agency now buying the glove, and he told MS NOW plainly: “It’s too easy for this to get misused, against a population that doesn’t pose a threat.” (AP).
Michael Mannheimer, a law professor at Northern Kentucky University, asked the question DHS refuses to answer: “if ICE agents have this at their immediate disposal, will they use it more than they should? Will they jump over a lesser force that could be appropriate and successful to attain compliance, and instead use this first?” (AP).
New York Attorney General Letitia James went further, calling the plan a source of outrage and warning that ICE officers who misuse the glove in her state could face criminal and civil consequences (AP).
Even the industry has recognized the problem. Axon, the maker of the Taser, recently phased out its drive-stun mode (a similar pain-compliance function) after years of documented misuse by officers (AP). DHS is picking up a tool the private-sector market is walking away from, and buying it in bulk.
What “de-escalation” is supposed to mean
I want to be direct about this word, because DHS is hiding behind it. De-escalation is the deliberate practice of lowering the temperature of an encounter. It is voice, distance, time, cover, and options. In the military and in every legitimate law-enforcement curriculum I have ever seen, pain compliance is not de-escalation. It is force. Renaming it does not change what it is.
If DHS wanted de-escalation, it would fund more agents trained to talk, more interpreters, more supervisors on scene, and more body cameras that actually stay on. Instead, it is buying a glove that hurts people without leaving a mark, and calling the hurt a de-escalation.
The vocabulary is the tell. When an agency has to redefine the verb “shock” to mean “calm,” it has stopped explaining itself and started laundering.
I have questions that Congress and the courts should ask before a single glove ships
- Under what specific use-of-force policy is the glove authorized, and where is that policy published?
- Every activation of the glove records an event. Will those records be preserved, made available to Congress, and disclosed to defense counsel? (Compliant Technologies)
- Will body-worn cameras be required to run for every activation?
- What is the training requirement, in hours, and who audits it?
- Will the manufacturer’s exclusions (elderly, pregnant, children, severely disabled) be written into policy as bright-line prohibitions, with termination as the penalty?
- Why a no-bid contract for a tool, the industry’s leading manufacturer of the closest analog, just abandoned?
If DHS cannot answer those in plain English before the March 2027 delivery date, Congress should block the purchase. The Appropriations Committees have the authority. Use it.
Midterm elections are coming up.
A federal agency does not need a new weapon to safely detain a landscaper on a ladder. It does not need a shock glove to serve paperwork to a family in a driveway. It needs adults, training, transparency, and restraint. The reason DHS is buying the glove is not that ICE cannot do its job without one. The reason is that the glove makes pain easier, quieter, and less visible in the news.
That is not de-escalation. What it really is is a $20 million pain button for an agency that has not earned another one.
I served this country. I do not recognize the country that hands its officers a glove designed to hurt people off camera and calls the hurt a courtesy.