Border czar Tom Homan defends ICE electric shock gloves critics say are cruel and violent

Dave Goldiner, New York Daily News on Aug 13, 2026

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Border czar Tom Homan on Thursday defended plans to spend $20 million to equip immigration agents with gloves that deliver painful electric shocks to help them carry out President Donald Trump’s mass deportation campaign.

The tough-talking lawman said the 380-volt stun gloves would give Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents a useful tool to subdue detainees or protesters that resist their actions without opening fire on them.

“It’s another device to help someone be compliant when they’re not,” Homan told Fox News. “You can’t just go from zero to a hundred and the first thing you go for is lethal force.”

Homan said agents would undergo extensive training before being equipped with the gloves, even though critics have said agents undergo scant vetting and training before being sent out on the streets to round up suspected undocumented immigrants.

“There’s a lot of training involved, there’s background issues that need to be dealt with,” he added. “So the implementation of these gloves in the field is going to be a while.”

He said the gloves might “serve a better purpose” in ICE detention facilities, which have also come under harsh criticism for abuses and poor conditions. Democratic lawmakers held a forum Monday calling for the closure of the Delaney Hall facility in Newark.

Critics trashed the stun gloves as another giant loophole for ICE abuse and a waste of taxpayer money.

“No one should be electrocuted into compliance,” said Murad Awawdeh of the New York Immigration Coalition. “Gloves that deliver pain on contact, handed to an agency that already operates in this city masked and unaccountable, is not public safety. It’s cruelty with a purchase order attached.”

Claire Valdez, who won a Democratic congressional primary in the NY-07 district spanning parts of Queens and Brooklyn, said the planned shock gloves provide ammunition for her call to abolish ICE.

“As long as its agents are deployed to terrorize our communities, they will be armed with increasingly violent tools to disappear our neighbors, and attack those who protest against them,” Valdez told the News.

The Department of Homeland Security plans to buy thousands of the gloves capable of zapping suspects with painful shocks in a no-bid contract, according to federal government purchasing records first unearthed by the Associated Press.

Critics fear the device, marketed as The G.L.O.V.E., or Generated Low Output Voltage Emitter by its Kentucky manufacturer, represent an escalation in the nationwide mass deportation campaign.

At least 10 people have died in encounters with immigration agents since Trump launched the crackdown after retaking office, including American citizens Alex Pretti and Renee Nicole Good, who were protesting the ICE crackdown in Minneapolis.