Tom Homan wants you to know he is a humanitarian. The White House border czar took to “Fox & Friends” Thursday to defend ICE’s plan to spend up to $20 million on gloves that deliver painful electric shocks to human beings, and the framing he chose was almost beautiful in its cynicism. “You can’t just go from 0 to 100, right, and the first thing you go for is lethal force,” he said. So there it is. The spectrum of state violence now runs from “nothing” to “electrocution” to “death,” and we are supposed to be grateful the middle option exists.
The devices are called the G.L.O.V.E., which stands for Generated Low Output Voltage Emitter, a name engineered by someone who understood that if you make the acronym cute enough, people might forget what the product does. It is manufactured by Compliant Technologies LLC, a company whose very name is a confession. The gloves have been used in some jails and police departments in recent years, and ICE wants thousands of them, distributed to officers who, as University of South Carolina criminology professor Geoffrey Alpert noted, “may not be trained in other strategies like de-escalation or trained to interact with the public in non-enforcement ways, like most local police officers are.” Alpert called user error “almost predictable.” He is being generous. When you hand a pain-delivery device to agents who already have a documented force problem, the error is not a prediction. It is a plan.
At least six people have been shot and killed by immigration enforcement agents since last year. Motorists in Maine and Texas were killed last month. Homan’s answer to that body count is not to rethink the encounters, not to examine why agents are drawing weapons during traffic stops, not to invest in the training that every use-of-force expert in the country says is missing. His answer is a $20 million glove that hurts people enough to make them stop resisting, packaged as de-escalation. The word “de-escalation” has now been fully hollowed out. It used to mean talking someone down. It now means electrocuting them at a lower voltage than a bullet.
Florida Solar Fix / PexelsIn Bardstown, Kentucky, Nelson County Jailer Justin Hall demonstrated the gloves for reporters and described being shocked more than 10 times during training. The pain was intense, he said, but stops once the gloves are no longer touching skin. He called them “a great tool.” A jailer who has voluntarily been shocked in a controlled training environment is not the same as an undocumented person seized on a street corner by an agent who has been told these gloves are a compliance tool. Lived experience inside a facility is not the same as lived experience outside one. Hall’s comfort does not override the communities that will feel these gloves on their skin.
And while ICE builds its arsenal, the White House is scoring the footage. Ariana Grande told them to stop using her song “Bye” over a montage of agents handcuffing people. Sabrina Carpenter called a similar video “evil and disgusting.” Kenny Loggins asked them to remove “Danger Zone” from an AI-generated clip of Trump dumping waste on protesters. SZA called the whole operation “rage baiting artists for free promo.” When Variety asked the White House about using Taylor Swift’s music, the response was: “We made this video because we knew fake news media brands like Variety would breathlessly amplify them. Congrats, you got played.” They are not embarrassed. They are proud. Detention as content. Electric shocks as policy. Cruelty as brand.
This is not a debate about tools. It is a debate about who counts as human enough to be touched without voltage. Twenty million dollars for gloves that deliver pain, zero dollars for the training that might prevent the confrontations in the first place. Congress has the power of the purse. Civil rights organizations have the litigation infrastructure. Communities have the moral authority. Every one of them needs to move now, because the gloves are coming, and the administration that ordered them is already filming the trailer.