Twenty million dollars. That is what the Department of Homeland Security plans to hand a Lexington, Kentucky company called Compliant Technologies LLC for thousands of gloves that deliver electric shocks to human beings. The solicitation could drop as early as Friday, and the no-bid contract means there will not even be the pretense of competition. Just a quiet procurement notice, published Monday, and then the machinery of state violence rolls forward.
The device is called the G.L.O.V.E., which stands for Generated Low Output Voltage Emitter, a name engineered to sound clinical and harmless. It functions as a normal pair of patrol gloves until an officer presses a switch. Then it must be applied directly to a person’s skin to deliver what the manufacturer calls a “pain stimulus.” John Peters, president of the Institute for the Prevention of In-Custody Deaths and a man studying the device, described the sensation as “immediate and sharp” and compared it to “a bee sting.” He said it helps officers “gain compliance within seconds.”
Compliance. That is the word they chose. Not safety. Not de-escalation. Compliance. The gloves exist to make a human body do what an officer wants it to do through the application of electric pain.
Even the manufacturer acknowledges the danger. Compliant Technologies warns the gloves should not be used as punishment, should not be used against people merely exhibiting “verbal defiance or belligerence,” and should not be used on children, pregnant women, or elderly or disabled people. Those are extraordinary caveats for a product being marketed as a de-escalation tool. They are also caveats that ICE, an agency with a documented history of force and abuse in its detention facilities, will be trusted to enforce on itself.
Peters himself said he expects the devices to be misused by “a small number of employees.” He said this the way someone describes weather. A certain percentage of officers will torture people with these gloves. That is baked into the model. The plan is to train officers and recertify them every two years, and then accept that some of them will use the training as a license to inflict pain off-camera.
Jenn Rolnick Borchetta, deputy project director on policing at the ACLU, named the problem precisely. “ICE spent the last year showing this country they are too quick to use force,” she said. “Now they will be able to deploy electric shocks with the slight push of a button that maybe nobody else can see them do.” That is the design. A glove looks like a glove. There is no bright arc of electricity, no dart trailing wires, no scene that a bystander’s phone camera will capture as unmistakably excessive. There is an officer touching someone, and that someone screaming.
Amnesty International documented the global reality of these weapons in a report covering 40 countries over a decade. Electric shock devices have been used against protesters, students, migrants in detention, pregnant women, and children. Survivors reported burns, miscarriage, urinary dysfunction, insomnia, and profound psychological trauma. Patrick Wilcken, Amnesty’s researcher on security and policing, stated plainly that direct contact electric shock weapons “can cause severe suffering, long-lasting physical disability and psychological distress” and that prolonged use “can even result in death.”
Jeff Niklaus, the founder and CEO of Compliant Technologies, declined to comment. “Unfortunately, we are unable to speak on this subject,” he wrote. A company that manufactures a device to deliver electric shocks through a glove cannot speak about the largest purchase order it has ever received. DHS offered no immediate comment either. The silence is the tell.
This is not a training problem. This is not a policy memo problem. ICE is an agency operating under a president who has launched an immigration crackdown that has already produced documented abuses, and now it wants to put shock devices on every officer’s hands by March. The ACLU is right. The public should have zero confidence that these gloves will be used appropriately, because the system that would hold ICE accountable does not exist.
What must happen is not a better training course. What must happen is that this contract is stopped, that Congress exercises actual oversight over DHS spending, and that the communities most at risk of encountering these gloves are organized, informed, and prepared to document every encounter. Twenty million dollars for state-manufactured pain is not a policy choice. It is a decision about who counts as human in this country, and ICE has already answered that question too many times.