No-Bid Contract Puts Pain-Compliance Gloves on ICE Agents Arresting Migrants With No Criminal Record
DHS wants $2500 gloves that jolt migrants through skin contact, deployed by March 2027, with no competitive bidding and no public safety testing.
WASHINGTON — Two thousand five hundred dollars. That’s the price tag on a pair of gloves built to send an electric jolt through a migrant’s skin — and it’s the only hard number a source familiar was willing to confirm when MeidasTouch came asking.
The Department of Homeland Security published a procurement notice this month laying out its intent: outfit U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers with what the paperwork calls “conductive distraction and de-escalation devices.”
Sold under the brand name G.L.O.V.E. — Generated Low Output Voltage Emitter — the equipment is headed for both of ICE’s operational wings, Enforcement and Removal Operations and Homeland Security Investigations, on an expedited deployment target of March 2027. The budget ceiling: $10 million to $20 million. The contract mechanism: sole-source, no-bid, awarded without competition to a Lexington, Kentucky, defense and law enforcement vendor.
If it closes, it will be the largest commercial deal in Compliant Technologies’ history — and the first time this hardware moves out of county jails and municipal police departments and into the hands of federal agents making civil immigration arrests nationwide.
What the Glove Actually Does
Strip away the branding and the G.L.O.V.E. is a tactical patrol glove with circuitry sewn into the palm. A 3.7-volt lithium-ion battery powers it. A one-second press of a button arms it; a three-second hold shuts it down. Once armed, conductive pads on the palm and thumb — positive and negative, close together — complete a circuit the instant they touch bare skin, delivering a pulse the manufacturer’s own documentation puts between 210 and 380 volts depending on the model.
It is not a Taser. Tasers fire probes into muscle tissue and lock the body down through full neuromuscular incapacitation — the subject can’t move, whether or not they want to. The G.L.O.V.E. works through what the company calls “conductive distraction and de-escalation” technology: surface pain, not motor override. It requires unbroken skin contact to function at all, and a source familiar confirmed as much when MeidasTouch pressed on its capabilities this month.
“I can answer as well that the Glove is only Conductive through skin contact due to moisture on the skin. Will not ‘shock’ on hair/Fur/clothes,” the source said.
Which means the manufacturer’s own field guidance draws lines the physics can’t always hold. The user manual instructs officers to avoid the head, face, throat, chest and groin, and bars use on children, pregnant women, elderly people and severely disabled individuals. But the device has no way to verify who it’s touching. It only knows skin.
What Compliant Wouldn’t Say
MeidasTouch put five questions to the manufacturer: how many units exist and when they ship; the per-unit cost and projected sales volume; the technical specs for subduing a person; what human — versus animal — safety testing the company has conducted; and whether training and safety manuals would be made public.
A source familiar answered two of the five, on the record.
“I can answer the question about training as the process is a 1 day 6-8 hour training course to certify officers to use the Glove,” the source said. On price: “Per unit we sell them at $2500 but can get the exact msrp tomorrow morning.”
That leaves the harder questions sitting open — chief among them what human safety testing, if any, has been conducted on a device designed to jolt the body’s peripheral nervous system, and whether the training and safety manuals officers will actually use will ever see daylight. The company’s own manual, obtained separately, acknowledges the device triggers elevated blood pressure, accelerated heart and respiration rates and epinephrine spikes — and warns explicitly that the technology “may increase biological factors associated with sudden death during physical restraint scenarios.” Compliant did not answer whether that warning has been tested against human physiology or only inferred from comparable devices.
Who This Gets Used On
ICE agents show up to arrests in tactical gear, with weapons drawn, framing the job as inherently dangerous. The agency’s own historical record tells a different story: in more than two decades of existence, ICE has no record of an agent being killed by an immigrant during a domestic enforcement arrest. The deaths the agency has recorded in that span trace to illness, vehicle accidents and, in one 2011 case, a cartel-linked ambush in Mexico — not resistance encountered during a civil arrest on U.S. soil.
Meanwhile, the people on the other end of these arrests are, by the government’s own numbers, overwhelmingly not the threat the tactical posture implies. Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse data current as of July 11 shows 70.6% of people in ICE detention — 46,436 of 65,765 — have no criminal conviction at all. Analysts at TRAC and Cato Institute have separately found that nearly all of the growth in detention over the past year has come from people with no conviction or pending charge, and that even within the smaller share who do have records, the majority are non-violent.
Against that backdrop, a device built to inflict sharp, localized pain — activated by a switch invisible to bystanders, body cameras and the person being touched — is being introduced into encounters where the person on the receiving end is, more often than not, someone with no criminal history at all.
The Blind Spot Built Into the Design
Jenn Rolnick Borchetta, deputy project director on policing at the ACLU, has flagged the glove’s core selling point as its central danger: the shock is administered by an imperceptible switch, with no visible warning and no distinct signature on camera. Where a Taser announces itself with a laser sight and an audible arc, the G.L.O.V.E. leaves no trace an outside observer would recognize as a weapon being fired.
Margo Schlanger, who ran the DHS Office for Civil Rights and Civil Liberties, has drawn the sharper technical distinction: pain compliance and neuromuscular incapacitation are not the same tool. A Taser overrides the body’s ability to resist. The glove does not — it relies on the subject choosing to submit to pain, which means a panicked, reflexive flinch away from the shock can look, to an officer, indistinguishable from active resistance. That’s not a hypothetical. It’s the exact mechanism by which force encounters escalate.
John Sandweg, ICE’s former acting director, has raised a third problem: an agency that has expanded its workforce rapidly, with documented gaps in use-of-force training, is a bad candidate for fielding a new pain-compliance weapon agency-wide on a compressed timeline. His recommendation — a small, monitored pilot program, evaluated before broad rollout — is not what DHS has proposed. DHS has proposed a no-bid contract for thousands of units, deployed nationwide, in under eight months.
What’s Left Unanswered
A source familiar said “tomorrow morning” they will get back to MeidasTouch with the exact per-unit MSRP. What’s not clear how many gloves currently exist, when the first shipments to ICE would actually arrive, or what independent — as opposed to manufacturer-supplied — human safety data exists behind a device the company’s own manual links to sudden death risk.
DHS is betting on a no-bid contract before anyone checks. Migrant Insider checked. This is the kind of reporting that doesn't happen if nobody's paying for it. Subscribe, and send this to the one person in your life still asking 'but don't they just deport criminals?
WTF ARE WE DOING? Shut down this fascist gang. Hold hearings and accountability on all deaths and arrests of non-criminals. We do not need ice, we have customs and border patrol, FBI,sheriff's, state police, local police,and national guard. Take the ice budget and put it in health care. Are we really so stupid and bigoted that this is who we want to be? The republican-fascist party has truly let the fascist bigotry people out of the bag. Vote Democrat or just call yourself a fascist period.
Forget the gloves. It should be HANDS OFF anyone questioned or stopped by ICE for questioning. The ICE staff seem to be unable to control themselves or others without physical interventions that too often escalate and throwing people to the ground and other physical restraints in retaliation for looking like a someone (according to the Agent's own ideas) is a bad idea all around..
Since when is this acceptable, even with local police? People MIGHT BE someone or something so you can bring them, helpless, to their knees? No evidence or even conversation required. Imagine if this happened without thought or recourse or explanation, next to you on the street? Or TO YOU, on the street.
Ask a question first! Something like, "Can I speak with you about your immigration status?" If someone is a citizen or here legally they probably will not refuse. To move to physically incapacitate someone. with a device that may kill them, by interruption of normal heart function, first, rather than last, is dangerously risky for all in the area, including the ICE agent. Let's pretend this is real life and not some action movie with desperate criminals involved and do the sane thing here, Just ask.