ICE Solicits Up to $20M in Electric Shock Gloves Whose Manufacturer Warns They Can Cause 'Sudden Death'

DHS published a notice on August 10, 2026 outlining a plan to purchase $10–20 million worth of electric shock gloves for ICE officers. The device is the G.L.O.V.E. — Generated Low Output Voltage Emitter — manufactured by Compliant Technologies LLC, a veteran-owned firm in Lexington, Kentucky. The gloves look like ordinary work gloves; an officer activates the shock function with a button on the back and delivers the charge by laying hands on the subject’s bare skin. The product’s own user manual warns that use can “increase the affects [sic] that can cause sudden death,” including disruptions to heart rhythm, blood pressure, and blood chemistry, and the manufacturer recommends against use on older people, small children, pregnant people, and people with certain disabilities. The purchase is large enough to reach most of the agency’s field officers by the time deliveries conclude in March 2027. A pending wrongful-death suit alleges a 43-year-old man died in 2024 at the Madison County Detention Center in Richmond, Kentucky after being shocked 27 times with the gloves and 13 more with a Taser. Human Rights Watch called for the deployment to be halted.

The design property that matters is contact-based delivery through an object indistinguishable from ordinary gloves. A Taser is visible, discrete, and logged; a glove is worn continuously and the shock leaves no distinguishing mark, which collapses the evidentiary record that use-of-force review depends on. That arrives inside a system already documented as unable to account for its own deaths — post-release deaths removed from official reporting (2026-08-12–chajon-raxon-third-delaney-hall-death-post-release-non-reporting-policy), the Venturella memo eliminating post-release death reporting (2026-06-04–venturella-memo-eliminates-post-release-death-reporting-ice-accountability-erasure), and a documented undercount at Stewart (2026-08-05–mother-jones-ice-death-undercount-stewart-detention-trejo-ricano). It also arrives alongside a force doubled under OBBBA appropriations with documented vetting failures (2026-07-24–ice-agent-vetting-failures-obbb-doubled-force). Equipment whose distinguishing feature is that it does not leave evidence is being issued to an agency whose distinguishing feature is that it does not report outcomes.