“Electric shock has long been a common method of inflicting torture or other forms of ill-treatment worldwide. While electric shocks are sometimes inflicted using makeshift equipment—for instance, car batteries, mains wires or cattle prods—a wide variety of electric shock devices are specifically designed for and marketed to law enforcement.”—Amnesty International

This is what comes of giving a lawless agency unlimited funds to build detention centers, terrorize communities, and act as a secret police force.

Anything goes.

Masked raids. Unmarked vehicles. Warrantless arrests. Racial profiling. Sweeping surveillance. Detention camps. Excessive force. Citizens dragged off the streets. Protesters targeted. Congressional oversight obstructed. Government agents operating behind masks while refusing to identify themselves or explain the authority under which they act.

Now add electric shock gloves to the arsenal.

Immigration and Customs Enforcement is preparing to spend as much as $20 million to equip its agents with thousands of gloves capable of delivering painful electric shocks through direct contact with a person’s skin.

The devices are called G.L.O.V.E.s—Generated Low Output Voltage Emitters—and the government has dressed them up in the predictably sanitized language of the police state as “conductive distraction and de-escalation devices.”

Don’t be fooled by the benign-sounding euphemisms.

These are pain-compliance weapons.

ICE agents wearing the gloves will be able to touch a person’s exposed skin and deliver an electric shock intended to compel obedience.

White House border czar Tom Homan has been remarkably candid about the purpose: “It’s another device to help someone get compliant when they are not.”

There is that word again: compliance.

It has become one of the most dangerous words in the vocabulary of the American police state.

Increasingly, government agents are being taught—and the public conditioned to accept—that refusal to immediately comply with a government agent’s command is sufficient justification for force.

Question an officer. Hesitate. Pull away. Protest. Demand to know why you are being detained. Refuse to surrender your phone. Attempt to record an arrest. Insist on your constitutional rights. Fail to obey quickly enough.

The government’s answer is increasingly the same: comply or die—comply or suffer the consequences.

Now those consequences may come through the touch of a gloved hand.

The Trump administration insists that these shock gloves offer ICE agents a less lethal alternative to guns, tasers and pepper spray. Certainly, if the choice were truly between an electric shock and a bullet, the less lethal option would be preferable.

But that is not the real choice confronting us.

The question is whether an agency with ICE’s record of abuse, secrecy and constitutional violations should be entrusted with yet another tool that makes it easier to inflict pain in order to force submission.

The problem is not merely the weapon. The problem is who will be wearing it.

ICE has already demonstrated what happens when government agents are empowered to treat noncompliance as a threat.

A recent ACLU review of more than 1,200 immigration-enforcement incidents documented hundreds of instances in which agents pushed, shoved, tackled or pinned people, along with dozens of incidents involving tactics capable of restricting breathing. Chemical agents were deployed hundreds of times. The incidents included U.S. citizens caught up in immigration operations and families confronted by armed and masked agents.

Inside ICE detention facilities, the record is equally disturbing.

Internal ICE documents reviewed by The Washington Post revealed 1,460 reported use-of-force incidents between January 2024 and February 2026. During the first year of Trump’s second term, detention staff used force 37 percent more often than during the preceding year, while the number of detainees subjected to force increased 54 percent.

In some cases, detainees were asking for food, water, medical attention or their personal belongings. In others, they were protesting the conditions under which they were being confined.

One group at a Georgia detention center was pepper-sprayed after refusing to return to their cells while complaining that they had not received medical care.

The official justification was chillingly familiar: to “gain compliance and control.”

That is precisely why ICE’s new shock gloves should concern anyone who cares about civil liberties.

Less lethal does not mean less abusive.

Indeed, the danger with so-called less-lethal weapons is that because they are perceived as safer than firearms, government agents may become more willing to use them in circumstances that would never justify deadly force.

A gun is obviously a weapon.

A baton is obviously a weapon.

A taser is obviously a weapon.

An electrified glove can look like an ordinary piece of equipment until the moment an agent lays a hand on you.

The shock ends when contact ends. The devices reportedly do not incapacitate a person in the way a taser can, and supporters emphasize that they generally do not leave burns or obvious contact marks.

That is supposed to reassure us. It should do the opposite.

Any government technology capable of inflicting intense pain while potentially leaving little visible evidence of its use demands extraordinarily strict controls, transparency and accountability.

ICE has demonstrated little reason to believe those safeguards will exist.

When accountability disappears, anything goes.

This is an agency whose detention centers remain largely closed to public scrutiny, whose internal reports have obscured or omitted serious uses of force, and whose agents have repeatedly operated in ways that make meaningful public accountability difficult.

Even members of Congress attempting to exercise their constitutional oversight responsibilities have been blocked from entering ICE facilities.

Meanwhile, ICE has built an expansive surveillance dragnet incorporating facial recognition, license plate readers, cellphone tracking and massive databases capable of locating and monitoring people across the country.

Put all of these pieces together and the picture should disturb Americans regardless of their views on immigration.

Masked agents. Hidden identities. Mass surveillance. Unmarked vehicles. Expansive arrest powers. Mass detention. Weak oversight. Billions of dollars in new funding. And now the ability to deliver electric shocks at the touch of a hand.

This is no longer merely an immigration enforcement bureaucracy.

It is the architecture of a national police force.

And increasingly, ICE is being positioned to serve the role that secret police forces have historically served in authoritarian systems: operating with extraordinary powers, obscured identities, limited accountability, and a broad mandate to identify, track, detain and remove people whom the government has designated as undesirable.

This does not mean America has suddenly become Nazi Germany, Stalinist Russia or some other totalitarian regime. History rarely repeats itself so neatly.

What history does teach, however, is that authoritarian governments do not begin with death camps and firing squads.

They begin by normalizing powers that once would have been considered intolerable.

They begin by identifying a population that can be stripped of rights with minimal political consequences. They begin by convincing citizens that extraordinary government powers are necessary because the people being targeted are dangerous, criminal, foreign or undeserving. They begin by making government agents harder to identify and harder to hold accountable. They begin by expanding detention. They begin by expanding surveillance. They begin by lowering the threshold for the use of force.

And they teach the public that obedience is the price of safety.

ICE is serving as the prototype for what a much broader system of authoritarian enforcement could look like.

Immigrants may be the government’s primary targets today. They will not necessarily be the only targets tomorrow.

The constitutional danger has never depended on whether one sympathizes with the first people subjected to government abuse. The question is whether we allow the government to acquire powers that can eventually be turned against anyone.

Once the government normalizes masked federal agents carrying out warrantless sweeps, what prevents those tactics from being used in the name of fighting drugs? Or terrorism? Or political extremism? Or civil unrest? Or public health emergencies? Or whatever crisis comes next?

Once the government builds massive databases capable of tracking people’s movements and associations, those systems do not disappear when immigration enforcement changes. Once detention infrastructure is built, it can be repurposed. Once federal agencies are allowed to operate outside meaningful oversight, restoring those restraints becomes extraordinarily difficult.

Once Americans accept the principle that government agents may inflict pain merely to secure “compliance,” the Constitution has already lost critical ground.

And once anything goes in the name of immigration enforcement, there is little to prevent those same powers from being repurposed in the name of the next crisis.

This is why the debate over ICE’s electric shock gloves cannot be reduced to a technical discussion about whether one weapon is safer than another.

The gloves are merely the latest manifestation of a far more dangerous philosophy of government.

It is the philosophy that says government knows best. That government commands must be obeyed. That government agents should be feared rather than questioned. That constitutional rights become negotiable whenever officials invoke public safety. That accountability is an inconvenience. And that force is an acceptable substitute for consent.

This is precisely the mentality the Constitution was intended to restrain.

The Fourth Amendment does not say obey first and challenge the government later.

The First Amendment does not protect only speech that government agents find agreeable.

The Fifth Amendment does not permit government to dispense with due process because officials have decided someone probably does not belong here.

And the Constitution contains no exception allowing government agents to punish people simply because they fail to show sufficient deference.

Yet that is the direction in which the American police state continues to move.

We are told not to worry because the weapons are “less lethal.” We are told not to worry because the raids target immigrants. We are told not to worry because the surveillance is necessary. We are told not to worry because the detention centers are temporary. We are told not to worry because good people who follow the law have nothing to fear.

As we make clear in Battlefield America: The War on the American People and its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, we have heard all of this before.

Every expansion of government power comes wrapped in assurances that it will be used sparingly, responsibly and only against people who deserve it.

Then the definition of who deserves it expands.

Government power does not police itself. Neither will ICE.

The gloves are off.

The question now is how much more power Americans are willing to place in the government’s hands before we finally recognize what is being built around us.

ABOUT JOHN W. WHITEHEAD

Constitutional attorney and author John W. Whitehead is founder and president of The Rutherford Institute. His most recent books are the best-selling Battlefield America: The War on the American People, the award-winning A Government of Wolves: The Emerging American Police State, and a debut dystopian fiction novel, The Erik Blair Diaries. Whitehead can be contacted at staff@rutherford.org. Nisha Whitehead is the Executive Director of The Rutherford Institute. Information about The Rutherford Institute is available at www.rutherford.org.