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It’s Shocking: These aren’t kid gloves…
ICE agents are the new national police force, a role that was supposed to belong to the FBI. ICE now is in line for a $20 million plan to fit them with electric gloves (Guardian, August 24, 2026). The gloves are meant to shock people targeted for whatever reason by ICE. A Kentucky man has already died from being shocked multiple times in a jail with these devices.
These devices, a sort of glove-like taser, are capable of killing, and what does that mean for the militarization of these ICE agents and others on the streets of the US? The gloves are perhaps intended for immigrants, but will ultimately be used against others. Governments at all levels in some places in the US want to make those on and off the streets realize that they’re deadly serious at either rounding up immigrants, or making sure that protesters and others realize that they had better watch out. This is part of the increasing militarization of officials on the streets, a fact that has been going on for many decades. The increasing militarization on the domestic level began soon after the Vietnam War antiwar protests and has been growing ever since. When various law enforcement agencies show up and have the weaponry of a typical infantry unit, it’s obvious what can and sometimes does result.
The government has had the ability to apprehend immigrants who have broken the law without a mass plan to intimidate all immigrants and others.
Paralleling the growth of militarized agents of the government on the streets is the explosive growth of prisons following the Vietnam War. Prisons, however, grew for a much different reason, and keeping ordinary people in line, especially those who are minorities, was a direct outgrowth of the deindustrialization of the US. With the loss of millions of jobs, people who were no longer of use to the economy and government, had to be housed somewhere, and if it was not in poverty, then it was in the warehouse prison system that accompanied the loss of industry to other shores.
Seeing the parallels between police agencies on the streets and the massive US prison system is apparent to those who care to look.
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