The good guys protecting us from people who want to work and live here will continue their morally upright quest by electrocuting their foes into submission.
As the Associated Press reports, the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency is planning to spend up to $20 million to purchase thousands of “conductive distraction and de-escalation devices” that officers and agents can wear in the field to zap anyone they don’t like.
The devices are called GLOVEs, short for Generated Low Output Voltage Emitters. Their manufacturer, Compliant Technologies, says that they behave like normal gloves until activated with a switch, and need to make direct contact with someone’s skin. The painful shock they administer can help an ICE agent “gain compliance within seconds,” per the AP‘s reporting, citing the company.
“It’s immediate and sharp, and it will distract you. I call it like a bee sting,” John Peters, president of the Institute for the Prevention of In-Custody Deaths, who’s studying how the device is being used, told the AP. “If the officer is getting any type of resistance from the person, this is certainly an effective tool.”
These plans were disclosed in a notice published Monday by the Department of Homeland Security, which states that the devices would be delivered by the end of next March. It’s unclear exactly how many the DHS intends to buy, or how long it will be until agents would start using them.
The news has left left civil rights advocates horrified.
“ICE spent the last year showing this country they are too quick to use force. Now they will be able to deploy electric shocks with the slight push of a button that maybe nobody else can see them do,” Jenn Rolnick Borchetta, deputy project director on policing at the American Civil Liberties Union, told the AP. “Introducing gloves that can so easily be used to deliver terrible pain in encounters is a recipe for harm to the public.”
“This is a rogue agency with an $80 billion slush fund that allows them to concoct and fund new ways to visit cruelty upon our communities,” Kica Matos, the president of the National Immigration Law Center, told CNN, calling the the possible use of the gloves “disgusting and barbaric.”
Naively, or simply to exonerate itself of any future wrongdoing, Compliance Technologies warns that its capital-G GLOVEs should not be used as punishment, against people merely exhibiting “verbal defiance or belligerence” or on children, pregnant women or elderly or disabled people, per the AP.
Of course, it knows fully well the kind of customer it’s getting in bed with. ICE agents have repeatedly put children in harm’s way and beat teenagers, used force to capture pregnant women, and body-slammed elderly citizens — which is to say nothing of the people they’ve also shot and killed.
We’ve already seen how regular law enforcement can misuse the devices. In 2022, two corrections officers at the Laurens County Detention Center in South Carolina were arrested and charged with brutalizing an inmate and using a GLOVE device to repeatedly stun them, CNN noted.
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