What happened
ICE plans to spend up to $20 million to outfit immigration agents with gloves that can deliver electric shocks to debilitate people they are trying to detain, the Department of Homeland Security said in a procurement notice this week. Local law enforcement has been using the Generated Low Output Voltage Emitter (GLOVE) devices “more often in jails than in the streets, where ICE officers have increasingly used force to extract people from cars” and confront protesters, said The Associated Press.
Who said what
The GLOVE user manual says it can inhibit subjects from “performing coordinated muscle movement.” Demonstration videos “show it inflicting pain,” NPR said. Many of the police officers subjected to the device “grimace or yell, and almost all of them fall to the ground.”
DHS calls the gloves a “de-escalation device.” But “critics worry they could instead be used to intensify ICE’s already-aggressive enforcement tactics,” The New York Times said. GLOVE maker Compliant Technologies warns the devices “should not be used in response to verbal defiance, or for punishment,” said the AP, or “against some populations that ICE agents routinely encounter: the elderly, small children, pregnant women and the severely handicapped.”
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What next?
The “size of the purchase suggests ICE plans to give the device to most or all of its officers,” the AP said. ICE agents have already shown “they are willing to disregard the law and are too quick to use force, with devastating and at times fatal consequences,” said the ACLU’s Jenn Rolnick Borchetta in a statement. Adding gloves that can covertly shock people is “a recipe for more harm to the public and less accountability.”
