US Immigration and Customs Enforcement is preparing to spend as much as $20 million on electric-shock gloves designed to inflict intense pain through direct physical contact, including during kidnapping operations, detention and forced deportations.

A Department of Homeland Security contracting notice published Monday and first reported on by AP lists a planned purchase of the CTG-5 G.L.O.V.E., or Generated Low Output Voltage Emitter, manufactured by Compliant Technologies LLC of Lexington, Kentucky. The notice estimates the contract at between $10 million and $20 million and indicates that there will be no competition.

The gloves are slated to be issued to agents with Homeland Security Investigations and Enforcement and Removal Operations, the ICE divisions responsible for raids, arrests, imprisonment and deportations. The department expects the contract to be completed by March 31, 2027.

The acronym-laden description of the glove as a “Conductive Distraction and De-escalation Device” is a bureaucratic euphemism. The weapon is designed to deliver electric shocks through an agent’s hand, causing immediate and overwhelming pain until the targeted person submits.

Promotional videos show people screaming and collapsing within seconds of being grabbed. If the person is already on the ground, merely touching them with the activated glove produces another shock.

Compliant Technologies markets the device as “humane” and “non-lethal.” Its own manual demolishes these claims.

“CD3 Technology is not risk free and should be treated seriously like any other weapon,” the manual states. It warns that its use “may cause or contribute to death or serious injury.”

The CTG-5 can produce between 324 and 362 volts. A fully charged battery can power 90 minutes of “continuous stimulation,” allowing an agent to administer repeated shocks without replacing or recharging the battery. The manufacturer recommends shocks of up to 15 seconds at a time and warns that no more than two gloves should be applied simultaneously to one person.

The device is meant to be pressed against human skin, although the manual states that it can also function through soaked T-shirts and other thin clothing. It advises agents to avoid the head, face, throat, chest and groin. It also recommends against using the weapon on elderly people, small children, pregnant women and severely disabled people.

These are merely recommendations. Compliant Technologies explicitly leaves individual police agencies to establish their own rules.

The manual acknowledges that the shocks can increase blood pressure, respiration, heart rate and adrenaline, alter blood chemistry and heart rhythm and contribute to sudden death. “The longer the CD3 exposure,” it warns, “the greater the potential risk.”

The danger is not theoretical. In a December 2025 promotional video, Compliant Technologies President and Chief Operating Officer Dan de la Cruz described using the glove on a friend who had suffered severe nerve damage in a car accident.

“Because of his nerve damage, for him it was horrible,” de la Cruz said. “He fell on the ground and for days after his nerves were like on fire. His arm was just a mess for a couple of days.”

Nerve damage and other underlying conditions are not necessarily visible. Yet the company proposes handing this weapon to unaccountable masked ICE agents operating in parking lots, homes, workplaces, airports, courthouses and detention centers.

The company insists that the gloves are intended to “gain compliance,” not for “verbal defiance,” “punishment,” “torture” or “horse play.” These disclaimers are worthless.

Police agencies have always treated alleged “non-compliance” as a license to beat, tase, choke and kill. The threshold is even lower than the familiar claim that an officer “feared for his life.” An ICE agent need only assert that a worker, immigrant or protester did not submit quickly or completely enough.

On Monday, masked ICE agents in Falls Church, Virginia boxed in the vehicle of Carolina Molina, a US citizen and licensed counselor, after she cursed at agents she saw arresting two people. One agent immediately approached Molina’s window with a pistol pointed inches from her head.

The agent accused her of attempting to run the officers over. Molina’s dashcam footage does not show such an attempt. Nevertheless, DHS subsequently accused her of “weaponizing her vehicle,” recycling the same lie used to justify the killings of Renee Nicole Good, Lorenzo Salgado Araujo and Johan Sebastián Durán Guerrero.

Molina’s alleged “non-compliance” consisted of condemning ICE and refusing to accept the agent’s lies. Had he been wearing an electric-shock glove, the same agent could have reached through her window and tortured her while claiming that he was merely trying to “gain compliance.”

Another use promoted by Compliant Technologies is “prisoner transport.” In practice, this means equipping ICE agents with electric-shock gloves to force immigrants into vehicles and onto deportation flights.

The implications are demonstrated in an August 8 report by the Arizona Daily Star on immigrants deported to Equatorial Guinea and imprisoned at the decommissioned Hotel Bamy. Ahmed Soliman, Peta-Gaye Chambers and Natalie Holmes all had habeas corpus petitions pending in federal court when ICE deported them without warning to a country where none had any ties.

None received advance notice or an opportunity for a fear screening. All three said they were coerced or physically forced onto deportation flights. Soliman said several men carried him onto the plane after he sat down and demanded a fear screening.

Chambers and Holmes initially refused to board their 18.5-hour flight. An ICE agent threatened to place them in full-body straitjackets for the entire journey. The agent told them they would have to “piss and shit on yourself” until they reached Africa. Faced with this threat, both women boarded the plane.

This is what ICE and Compliant Technologies mean by “gaining compliance.” People whose legal challenges remain unresolved are threatened, restrained and physically forced onto deportation flights. The electric-shock gloves would provide ICE agents with another instrument of torture to overcome resistance and then describe the abuse as “de-escalation.”

Holmes, an ordained pastor whose habeas corpus petition was still pending in Florida when she was deported, summarized the character of the operation:

“I feel we’re in Nazi Germany. If you can just get up and move people that federal judges say are not to be moved, you’re a one-man dictatorship.”

Since arriving in Equatorial Guinea, the deportees have remained imprisoned at Hotel Bamy. Holmes, Chambers and Soliman told the Star that armed men wearing ski masks dragged them from their rooms at gunpoint on July 31, assaulted and handcuffed them and threatened to shoot them and bury them across the street if they attempted to leave.

The planned purchase is one component of the immense bipartisan buildup of the American police state. Trump’s 2025 “One Big Beautiful Bill” supplied approximately $170 billion for immigration enforcement, including $75 billion for ICE and $45 billion to construct new detention camps.

The nearly $70 billion appropriated in June through the Secure America Act will fund ICE and Customs and Border Protection through 2029. Although Republicans supplied the votes for final passage, the allocation was made possible by a maneuver engineered by Democratic Senate leadership.

Following the murders of Renée Nicole Good and Alex Pretti and the eruption of mass opposition in Minneapolis, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer and the Democrats separated DHS funding from the broader government spending bill. They then voted to fund the rest of DHS while excluding ICE and Border Patrol, without securing a single restriction on the immigration Gestapo.

This allowed the Democrats to posture as opponents of ICE while they demobilized protests and suppressed growing calls for a general strike. As Democratic leaders knew would happen, Republicans then used the budget reconciliation process to pass the ICE and Border Patrol funding with a simple Senate majority.

The electric-shock gloves are being purchased from this ocean of money. They are the product of a police-state buildup carried out by the Republicans with the indispensable political collaboration of the Democratic Party.