An ICE agent points and threatens to use their taser on protesters outside the federal immigration center at Delaney Hall in Newark, New Jersey, where ICE is housing detained immigrants on May 27, 2026. —Adam Gray—Getty Images
The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) is moving to equip immigration officers with gloves that can administer electrical shocks, a plan that is sparking alarm from former department officials.
According to a notice published by DHS this week, it will spend up to $20 million to purchase Generated Low Output Voltage Emitters, or G.L.O.V.Es, by the end of March 2027. The department, which described the gloves in the notice as a “conductive distraction and de-escalation device,” said they would be issued to Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officers.
“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,” a DHS spokesperson said in a statement to TIME.
The plan to equip immigration officers with the devices comes as the Trump Administration has faced widespread scrutiny over the use of force in its immigration crackdown, which has seen at least 10 people die in encounters with federal agents since Trump returned to office last January.
The DHS spokesperson tells TIME that 70% of the people ICE arrests are “dangerous illegal aliens charged or convicted of a crime,” echoing Trump and federal officials’ repeated claims that the crackdown is targeting the “worst of the worst”—though data have shown that a majority of those held in ICE custody during Trump’s second term have no criminal convictions on their records.
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The notice of DHS’s plans to purchase the gloves has drawn concern from former DHS officials, who tell TIME that the devices aren’t necessary as an enforcement method against the civilian population—and that their use in that capacity would pose numerous risks.
“The idea that you need tools like this, this level of force, to subdue a non-criminal immigrant who's in a secure environment … that is alarming,” says John Sandweg, who served as the acting director of ICE and acting general counsel of DHS during the Obama Administration.
Sandweg contends that there is “a high potential for abuse” with the new devices due to the rapid hiring of new immigration officers who he says are not receiving sufficient training.
Documents produced by two DHS whistleblowers in February showed that ICE had significantly scaled up its hiring while axing several screening and training protocols for officers.
“We're seeing lots of problems with training on use of force,” Sandweg says. He describes the plan to introduce the gloves to what he characterizes as an under-trained immigration task force that is quickly expanding as “incredibly concerning.”
The former acting ICE director argues that such a device should not be rolled out en masse, but rather “in small pilots” in order to determine that it “actually helps solve the problem” in immigration enforcement contexts and “doesn’t get abused.”
On top of that, he contends that the device should require extensive in-person training.
“It's tone deaf,” Sandweg says. “We’ve lost sight of the public safety mission of ICE.”
Margo Schlanger, who led DHS’s office for civil rights and civil liberties under the Obama Administration, tells TIME that a taser, which many immigration officers are equipped with or have access to, is a much more effective enforcement tool.
And in addition to being less effective, she also argues that the gloves would pose a greater threat of harming people who have encounters with immigration officials, while making it more difficult to hold officers accountable.
Unlike a taser, which incapacitates its target by temporarily locking up their muscles and inhibiting bodily control, the gloves “are only about pain compliance,” Schlanger says.
“They don't incapacitate. They just hurt, and so what that means is that they're not only used in a situation when a person is posing a risk to a law enforcement officer,” she says to TIME. “Pain compliance is a method of painful domination. Because of that, it's very subject to being misused. It can be used in circumstances where it's not needed. It can be used to excess.”
A taser is also more effective, safe, and humane, she contends, because it can be brandished from a distance before it is used.
“If you're actually interested in compliance, brandishing a taser is a pretty good method of eliciting compliance, and nobody gets hurt,” she says.
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Schlanger references an article published by Police & Security News in which Jeff Niklaus, the founder and CEO of Compliant Technologies, which manufactures the gloves, is quoted as describing the device as “low optic”—meaning that, unlike tasers, they can be used discreetly.
“What low optics means is that they don't want anybody watching to know that they're doing this,” Schlanger asserts. “It looks like ICE is trying to avoid public accountability. That's what this device does for them.”
Compliant Technologies declined TIME’s request for an interview.
Jenn Rolnick Borchetta, deputy director on policing at the ACLU, similarly raises concern about this aspect of the gloves in a statement to TIME.
“They might be equipped with a device that allows them to deliver an electric shock with their hands by pushing a small button, in a move that might be imperceptible to those watching,” Borchetta says. “Giving immigration agents a concealed means of delivering terrible pain is a recipe for more harm to the public and less accountability.”