On 11 August, the Associated Press reported that the Homeland Security Agency will spend up to $20m to equip its agents with gloves that can deliver painful electric shocks to the skin of a person deemed uncooperative. The “conductive distraction and de-escalation devices”– branded Glove, for Generated Low Output Voltage Emitter – will be supplied by their manufacturer, Compliant Technologies, through a no-bid contract.
News of the acquisition inspired the editorial cartoonist Ann Telnaes to publish a cartoon of an ICE agent wearing the glove, underneath which are a branding iron, an iron maiden, a rack, and other compliance technologies. AKA, instruments of torture.
Indeed, Amnesty International reports that portable, convenient electric shock devices made for law enforcement like the glove can be, and have been, used for torture. Once called weapons, they’re now marketed as “humane”. They are the former. A prisoner in Kentucky died of a heart attack after 27 successive shocks, directly following 13 Taser hits.
ICE tactics, already sadistic, are looking increasingly like torture. The Geneva conventions define torture as the infliction of severe pain or suffering, whether physical or mental, by an agent of the state acting in their official capacity, to obtain intelligence or confession or to intimidate, coerce, or punish a prisoner or detainee. More than 90% of detainees are held in privately-owned immigration detention facilities, but their employees are contractual agents of the federal government.
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According to an investigation by the Guardian, at least 10 immigrant detainees have been subjected to force-feeding and involuntary medical procedures. The detainees are on hunger strikes in protest of the appalling conditions of their incarceration, including, ironically, inedible food and denial of necessary medical treatment. One of the victims, a Kurdish film-maker, described being held in solitary confinement, tackled, shackled, and force fed twice daily for eight months. HSA anticipates hunger strike management will cost $169,000 in fiscal 2026.
To force-feed a person, a tube is inserted into their mouth or nose and pushed down into their stomach. Then liquid food or medicine is poured into the tube through a funnel. The person gags, chokes, and often vomits; when they struggle – a natural response – they are usually restrained. “What they’re doing qualifies as torture,” a doctor told the Guardian, expressing a contention widely held by medical professionals, ethicists and human rights experts.
Some of the torture is outsourced. The administration is sending asylum seekers back to the countries from which they fled under threat of imprisonment, torture or execution – and where they face torture or death on return. The US has built a gulag of collaborating third countries where deportees may be locked up indefinitely or deported to the home countries they fled. Forced return, or refoulement, of refugees and asylees – which is also the result of Trump’s recent revocations of temporary protective status for many foreign nationals – is banned under the UN Convention Against Torture, which the US signed.
And then there is the malign neglect. The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has released detainees into the cold without adequate money or clothing. At least two – a Haitian woman, Daphy Michael, and a blind Rohingya man, Nurul Amin Shah Alam, a refugee from Myanmar – have frozen to death. Medical examiners are calling both deaths homicides. (DHS says ICE and border patrol had “nothing to do” with the deaths.)
Children, too, are being deliberately abandoned. In a bid to force them to release confidential information about their clients, the administration is withholding payments from the organizations that provide legal representation to unaccompanied migrant children. About 25,000 kids, some of them unable to speak English – or speak at all – have been left to fend for themselves in court. Such representation is mandated under a section of the 2008 federal anti-trafficking law, which Project 2025’s Homeland Security chapter recommends repealing.
Speaking to MSNOW, Lindsay Toczylowski, an attorney at the Immigrant Defenders Law Center, said that since her agency’s payments were cut off on 31 July, colleagues “witnessed a seven-year-old child taking a final order to leave the United States this week, without a lawyer”, she said. Where will that child go? Who, if anyone, will look after him? What permanent damage will befall him?
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The number of infants and toddlers in custody has dramatically increased under the Trump administration, according to the Marshall Project, to 25 children under the age of three on an average day. That is “probably the most harmful time of their lives” to experience such trauma, said the cofounder of the executive committee of the American Academy of Pediatrics’ Council on Immigrant Child and Family Health. “Our immigration system is breaking children.”
Is this torture? Maybe not technically. It is surely child abuse, which is illegal under US criminal law and international human rights law – and immoral under any religious or ethical code.
“The fact is, being in detention is a choice,” HSA deputy assistant secretary Lauren Bis said in response to distraught parents’ reports of children sickening nearly to death at the South Texas Family Residential Center in Dilley. “We encourage all parents to take control of their departure by using the CBP Home app and receiving a free flight home and $2,600.” FAQs on the app’s website suggest that this “option” is not exactly voluntary either. “Illegal aliens” are informed that should they decline to take the deal, “ICE will continue to prioritize your removal.”
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Routine practices of current immigration detention such as prolonged solitary confinement, beatings, and sleep deprivation are widely defined as torture. An argument can also been made – and advocates have made it – that even those aspects of the mass deportation policy that do not conform with the legal definition of torture are designed to create so much misery that immigrants will leave on their own or not come in the first place. During Trump’s first term, the administration unapologetically justified its “zero tolerance” family separation at the border as a deterrent to would-be immigrant parents.
These tactics, even when carried out in diffuse and intermittent ways, fit the general definition of torture precisely: the infliction of pain and suffering by the state to compel a person to do something they fiercely do not want to do.
The deportation machine is in high gear. In July, the New York Times reported that ICE had arrested 10,000 people in five days, having doubled its daily quota to the 2,000. The abuses inside detention facilities are bound to increase too.
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At the same time, NPR reported on Thursday, the already teetering system through which ICE detainees could report abuse without fear of recrimination “has collapsed”, and there’s nowhere else to turn, since virtually all other government oversight has been demolished.
Civil liberties and immigrant rights lawyers are flooding the federal courts with lawsuits and petitions for interdiction of these sadistic practices. But any charge of torture is unlikely to get far. The constitution’s eighth amendment prohibits cruel and unusual punishment, and harm by police or prison guards can be redressed through state civil rights laws. But torture is effectively condoned in the US; federal anti-torture statute applies only to acts committed outside US borders.
The slim avenues to legal recourse and the refusal of transparency or accountability by the perpetrators of de jure and de facto torture are driving detainees to desperate measures like hunger strikes. They are “risking their lives to protest inhumane conditions and legal rights violations”, reports NPR. Self-deportation or self-starvation. That is not a choice.
