Immigrations and Customs Enforcement officers could soon be provided gloves that administer painful electric shocks, the latest in a series of costly purchases to bolster President Donald Trump’s mass deportation effort.
The Department of Homeland Security posted a notice about the purchase on Monday in the Acquisition Planning Forecast System, which provides alerts on contracts that the agency intends to issue in the coming days. The contract for the gloves, which the agency says would be used as a “distraction and de-escalation device,” would be issued to Enforcement Removal Operations and Homeland Security Investigations officers.
The contract could be awarded as early as Friday and is estimated to cost anywhere from $10 million to $20 million. It lists a completion date of March 31, 2027.
Although the notice of a potential contract does not name a company, the gloves in question — CTG-5 G.L.O.V.E., or Generated Low Output Voltage Emitter — are made by Compliant Technologies, a Kentucky-based company that has sold its gloves to various law enforcement agencies, according to its website.
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The plan to purchase the gloves was first reported by The Associated Press.
Jeff Niklaus, the founder and CEO of Compliant Technologies, said in an email to NOTUS that the organization was “unable to comment” on any potential contract.
A spokesperson for DHS told NOTUS that 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.”
“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,” the spokesperson said, pointing to the agency’s use of force policy.
The gloves that DHS is poised to purchase are the latest version of the product. They should not be “deployed” for more than 15 seconds, according to a user manual.
John Peters, the president of the Institute for the Prevention of In-Custody Deaths, told The Associated Press that the device would feel “like a bee sting.”
Immigration advocates expressed concern about the use of the gloves, pointing to federal immigration agents’ use of force since Trump returned to the White House last year.
Naureen Shah, the director of policy and government affairs for immigration at the American Civil Liberties Union, told NOTUS that although the gloves might be categorized as “less than lethal weapons,” they can be used in a way that could still endanger people’s lives.
“They’re reaching for their weapon, regardless of whether a person actually poses a specific imminent threat, just because they want to compel immediate obedience,” Shah said. “I don’t frankly trust these agents to be using shot gloves on people in a restrained way. We’re talking about a novel technology that they will not have had ample training on, and also an agency that is under orders from the administration to act as though they have immunity.”
If the contract is finalized, the glove purchase would be the latest in a year of record funding for DHS after Congress committed $191 billion for immigration enforcement and border security through fiscal year 2029, including $20 million for body cameras, in a reconciliation bill last year. In June, Congress provided another $70 billion in funding for ICE and CBP through another largely party-line bill.
Those figures have made ICE the highest-funded law enforcement agency in the country and nearly triples its budget from recent years.
New York Attorney General Letitia James said Wednesday that although her office was currently reviewing the details of the proposed contract, there could be legal recourse for those injured as a result of federal immigration agents’ use of the new technology.
“We are outraged,” James said during a press conference. “In the event that a New Yorker is injured as a result of these gloves, obviously there will be a private right of action as well as action from the state of New York. You can best be assured of that.”
ICE field officers are also expected to receive body cameras by the end of August, which former DHS Secretary Kristi Noem pledged to distribute after federal immigration agents shot and killed two U.S. citizens in Minneapolis earlier this year.
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