--- title: "Army tests found shock gloves stop resisters in seconds; ICE ordered 6,000 pairs" description: "The $16.7 million GLOVE order buys a device built to inflict pain, not immobilize, and to leave no mark" author: "Luis Goa" published: 2026-10-06T19:54:31Z modified: 2026-10-06T20:29:58Z url: https://rews.cc/a/army-tests-found-shock-gloves-stop-resisters-in-seconds-ice--d284d1 language: en tags: ["ice", "torture", "dhs", "deportation", "police", "us"] publisher: "Rews (https://rews.cc)" --- # Army tests found shock gloves stop resisters in seconds; ICE ordered 6,000 pairs *The $16.7 million GLOVE order buys a device built to inflict pain, not immobilize, and to leave no mark* By Luis Goa · October 6, 2026 · https://rews.cc/a/army-tests-found-shock-gloves-stop-resisters-in-seconds-ice--d284d1 ## In brief - ICE signed a $16.7 million contract in August for 6,000 pairs of GLOVE electric shock gloves - An October 2024 Army test at Fort Leavenworth found the gloves ended resistance in seconds through intense pain - The device’s manual warns of death-associated physiological effects and bars use on elderly, children and pregnant people - Unlike a taser, the gloves can shock without leaving marks; a Georgia official praised them for avoiding lawsuits - Sen. Cortez Masto says ICE has not answered 16 senators’ safety questions more than a month later In August, US Immigration and Customs Enforcement signed a contract for 6,000 pairs of electric shock gloves. [The Associated Press put the price at $16.7 million](https://apnews.com/article/ice-electric-shock-gloves-immigration-680c6f8a96736f46529287178c57b44b), or about $2,783 per pair; [Common Dreams, reporting on the same AP investigation](https://commondreams.org/news/ice-glove-intense-pain), rounded it to $17 million. Either way, the agency knew what it was buying: ten months earlier, the US Army had tested the same device on its own employees and recorded that the pain was severe enough to end resistance within seconds. The product is the Generated Low Output Voltage Emitter, or GLOVE, made by Compliant Technologies. The Army’s assessment draws a distinction that matters for how it will be used. A taser is designed to lock up the body of a noncompliant person; the GLOVE is not. It “works by overloading the peripheral nerve endings,” the study said. It is a pain-compliance tool, not an immobilization tool. In October 2024, the device was tested at the military prison in Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, on Army employees playing the role of combative prisoners, to see whether it could help move noncompliant inmates between cells. According to [the AP’s account of the study](https://apnews.com/article/ice-shock-gloves-army-study-pain-compliance-bf8e1ebf64eb6b7d79bed921cdb52676), participants — several of them large-statured men — stopped resisting within seconds of an officer touching the gloves to their skin, and were left with “fatigue, soreness and excessive apprehensiveness to being shocked again.” “Participants stated just seeing the GLOVE was enough to make them want to comply,” the authors wrote. Testers with water or oil on their skin received more severe shocks, and one participant remained in pain for 30 minutes afterward. The full Army report has not been released. What exists publicly is a four-page memo from the Army’s Office of the Project Manager for Close Combat Systems summarizing the findings, hosted on the manufacturer’s own website. The watchdog group American Oversight obtained the underlying records and provided them to the AP. ICE has described the gloves as a tool to “de-escalate” street confrontations during the Trump administration’s mass deportation campaign, saying they would be used on people “actively or passively resisting” agents’ commands. After several fatal shootings by agents that lacked clear justification, the agency has also pitched them as a “low-impact tool” that lets officers stop short of more extreme force. When politicians moved to restrict access, the Department of Homeland Security accused them of depriving federal officers of “safety equipment.” The safety equipment framing sits uneasily next to the device’s own user manual. The manual warns that the “pain stimulus” can produce the physiological changes associated with sudden death — increased blood pressure, heart rate and adrenaline, plus changes in blood chemistry and heart rhythm — and that a person who loses control of their extremities mid-shock can be seriously injured falling. It recommends against using the gloves on older people, small children, pregnant people and people with certain disabilities. Those are groups ICE operations have regularly targeted, as Reagan Williams, a researcher in Human Rights Watch’s Crisis, Conflict and Arms Division, noted in August. “Electric shock devices have long been abusively deployed around the globe, including as a method of torture and other ill-treatment. Given these risks, the European Union has implemented trade restrictions on these devices,” Williams said. “The scale of this technology’s potential harm in the hands of ICE, an abusive agency whose recruits are deployed with minimal training, could be considerable.” American Oversight’s executive director, Chioma Chukwu, points to a gap in the Army document itself: it concluded the gloves were effective and said little about whether they were safe. “The military assessment in ICE’s own files shows that these gloves can cause ‘intense pain’ and force compliance. It does not establish that they are safe,” Chukwu said. “Everyone should be alarmed that ICE is preparing to deploy a tool designed to inflict, at best, intense pain, without showing that it is safe for the people who will be subjected to it.” ## The feature that sells the glove Where a taser leaves burns and welts, the GLOVE can deliver a painful shock and leave no mark, which makes its use hard to prove afterward. Sellers of the device treat this as a selling point. “I highly recommend these gloves to anybody that’s looking for a utility they can use that is conducive to not leading to lawsuits,” Bob Couey, chief deputy of the Floyd County Sheriff’s Office in Georgia, said in a promotional video Compliant Technologies posted in 2024; Mother Jones resurfaced the video in August. Even a former head of the agency has flagged the misuse risk, and his argument is about friction, not malice. “It’s too easy for this to get misused, against a population that doesn’t pose a threat,” John Sandweg, ICE’s acting director for roughly six months under the Obama administration, told MS NOW in August. A tool that is painless to deploy and leaves no evidence gets used more often than the policy on paper would suggest. Congressional pushback has so far been letters. In late August, Rep. Delia Ramirez (D-Ill.) led 49 House members in demanding the contract be canceled. “Introducing low-visibility electric shock weapons into our immigration enforcement system is an unacceptable escalation that prioritizes physical intimidation and unaccountable force over human safety and administrative accountability,” they wrote to DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin. Around the same time, Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto (D-Nev.) and 15 other Democratic senators asked ICE how the gloves would be used, against whom, and whether the agency had run safety evaluations. Cortez Masto told the AP that more than a month later, none of those questions had been answered. The number to watch is not the $16.7 million; it is the use-of-force policy ICE has yet to produce for a device the Army documented producing fear at the sight of it.