In January of this year, ICE was in crisis. Their landmark project, Operation Metro Surge, had ended in catastrophic failure. The country was in revolt following the murder of multiple American citizens alongside countless videos, images, and stories of ICE officials indiscriminately targeting and terrorizing minority communities.
In other words, the administration’s hallmark project blew up in their face in spectacular fashion.
In response, Trump threw out Kristi Noem (and Corey Lewandowski, her weird envoy who she’s rumored to be having an affair with), and brought in new DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin, a guy who once threatened to fist-fight Teamsters President Sean O’Brien in a Senate hearing. (Bernie Sanders had to break them up.) Together with Border Czar Tom Homan, they promised reform and an end to the chaos.
Instead, ICE has continued killing people in the streets, in their detention camps, and in cold blood. As if it couldn’t get worse, ICE just rolled out a plan to disperse electric shock gloves to all their agents – a weapon that sounds more like something you’d find in a torture chamber.
The gloves, known literally as the G.L.O.V.E., are designed to deliver up to 380 volts and to instantly overwhelm a target’s muscles, demobilizing them.
ICE is billing these as “conductive distraction and de-escalation devices” – because the best way to de-escalate an arrest is obviously to surge electricity through a person’s body.
Six months after we were told order had finally come to ICE, the agency’s answer to a failed strategy is to resort to even more extreme, violent, and painful tactics.
Specialized electric shock gloves don’t come cheap. 20 million of your tax dollars are going towards the purchase of thousands of pairs, through yet another no-bid contract handed out by Trump. Between the botched reflecting pool, astronomically expensive ballroom, and the countless other no-bid sweetheart deals given out to Trump’s billionaire buddies, have any of these actually benefitted regular Americans, like, at all?
To add insult to injury, this latest expenditure is in addition to spending nearly $500 million on a new fleet of aircraft for ICE that have been sitting on a tarmac in Louisiana doing absolutely nothing, because they sort of forgot that planes need … pilots?
You’d be hard-pressed to imagine a more perfect metaphor for Trump’s approach to immigration:
Step 1: Fearmonger with cherry-picked (or entirely inaccurate) statistics to manufacture a crisis.
Step 2: Throw obscene amounts of money at the issue (because the same people who say we can’t invest in education, or healthcare, or anything that actually benefits Americans suddenly have $80 billion lying around for ICE.)
Step 3: Hastily roll out half-baked plans with unqualified and under-trained agents.
Step 4: Backtrack, blame someone else, and pretend none of it was your idea when it all fails miserably.
The worst part is while Trump and MAGA have exploded the ICE budget to surpass that of every other federal law enforcement agency combined, they’ve eviscerated what little transparency remained.
In June, ICE quietly eliminated its requirement to investigate and report the deaths of any detainees within 30 days of their release. Apparently, Trump has decided that whatever happens to someone inside an ICE detention camp couldn’t possibly have anything to do with their death a few days after leaving it, right?
That’s where the flailing becomes impossible to avoid. If Trump and his goons truly believe that their draconian, inhumane, and terribly inefficient immigration regime is popular and effective, why are they working so hard to hide it?
Between January and May 2026, ICE reported 18 deaths in its custody, on track to surpass the previous high set the year before.
That’s 18 families with an empty chair at the table. That’s parents, spouses, sons, daughters, and neighbors who died so that ICE could save a few bucks and Trump could cut a few corners. That also ignores the countless families with empty chairs because their loved ones are in detention camps with no end in sight to their internment.
Rather than reform a system that is literally killing people, Trump’s solution is to just stop reporting when it happens. Smoke and mirrors is all he knows how to do, and we’re all in his crosshairs.
Put simply, this isn’t the machismo behavior we’ve seen Trump display when he thinks he has a winning hand. It’s the behavior of an old man desperately trying to control the narrative around a policy that’s become impossible to defend.
If you were to ask Trump, all of this is meant to “Make America Safe Again.” But how is this safe for anyone?
For those courageous enough to stand up against Trump’s draconian immigration policy, or those unfortunate enough to “fit the bill” for what Trump and his goons think an illegal immigrant looks like, it certainly isn’t safe for them.
Perhaps that’s ultimately why the administration is so obsessed with the idea that ICE is winning. Because if ICE were actually winning, there wouldn’t be a need to spend millions of your taxpayer dollars on increasingly desperate new tools, or hundreds of millions on aircraft that can’t get into the air, or pulling out every stop to try to hide the consequences of what happens inside Trump’s detention camps.
What Trump and MAGA are hoping we all collectively forget is that our government is one of, by, and for the People. We have a right to know what our government is doing in our name and with our money.
And if they won’t tell us?
It’s our responsibility to make them by showing up in the courts, in the Congress, and most importantly, at the ballot box.
If “Make America Safe Again” requires electric shock gloves on the front end and hiding the true body count on the back end, perhaps it’s time to ask who exactly we’re being made safe from – and who the real danger is.
So sorry disturbing, just like all the other horrific things they’ve done.
Is there any way this can ever get shut down?
Maybe if the 2024 election fraud could come to light this can stop. So much work done by ETA and so many FACTS!
What it is going to take to shut them all down???