Rhode Island falls under ICE’s Boston enforcement jurisdiction, and the Wyatt Detention Center in Central Falls is listed under that same office, so a concealed contact-shock device raises direct questions about use-of-force documentation in encounters here.
A patrol glove looks like nothing at all. That is the point of it: black, unremarkable, the sort of thing every federal officer in the country pulls on before a shift, indistinguishable at ten feet from the gloves a man wears to shovel his driveway in February. The device that U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement now proposes to buy in bulk — the G.L.O.V.E., an acronym its Kentucky manufacturer says stands for Generated Low Output Voltage Emitter — is built to look exactly like that ordinary glove right up until the moment an agent’s palm makes contact with a person’s skin and delivers, by the company’s own published specifications, an electrical pulse in the range of 324 to 362 volts, with a listed ceiling of 380.
The Associated Press first reported on August 11 that the Department of Homeland Security was preparing a potential no-bid contract for the devices worth between $10 million and $20 million, intended to help officers gain compliance from combative individuals. Two days later, White House border czar Tom Homan defended the purchase publicly as another way for officers to gain compliance without resorting to deadly force — while acknowledging that actual field deployment would take time, because ICE was still working through training and policy…