ICE’s Plan to Give Officers Electric Stun Gloves, and a Siege on Palestinian Homes

**SPEAKER_1** (0:00)
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**Tracy Mumford** (0:33)
From the New York Times, it's The Headlines. I'm Tracy Mumford. Today is Thursday, August 13th. Here's what we're covering.
In a Times exclusive, my colleagues have learned about a major purchase by the Department of Homeland Security.
Last fall, DHS said it needed airplanes fast. Specifically, a fleet it could use for more deportation flights. It said the need was so urgent, there was no time to follow the federal requirement to get competing bids to ensure it was getting the best deal for taxpayer money. Instead, it ended up spending $464 million on a no-bid contract to buy 10 used airplanes. And since acquiring them, the Times has learned, the planes have barely been used for deportations or anything else. Three of the aircraft are luxury business jets, and within months of getting them, DHS started trying to loan or lease them out to other federal agencies, including for FBI Director Cash Patel to use, according to lawmakers on the Senate Appropriations Committee. The other seven planes have been left parked at an airport in Louisiana for months at a time. An internal government document reviewed by the Times said DHS didn't have the staff to operate them.
In all, the acquisitions were part of a surge of rushed spending by DHS. The department also spent more than $700 million on warehouses. It was going to turn into detention centers, many of which it's now trying to give away or sell. Overall, the nearly half a billion dollar plane contract also underscores what's become a broader trend in the second Trump administration, of no bid contracts being awarded to people with connections to the president or his cabinet. In this case, the chairman of the company that got the plane contract had donated to a group that supported Christie Noem, who was Homeland Security Secretary until the spring. In response to questions from the Times, a company spokesman said the chairman was unaware of the group's connections to Noem. A spokeswoman for Noem herself put responsibility for the purchase on the new DHS secretary, Mark Wayne Mullin. DHS responded with a statement saying it was all approved before Mullin was sworn in. In all, DHS has claimed urgency as a reason for granting no bid contracts more often than any other major government agency, accounting for almost two-thirds of the $34 billion in contracts that it signed last year.
Meanwhile, the Department of Homeland Security is also making plans to spend millions of dollars equipping its immigration officers with a new tool, gloves that can deliver electric shocks. So-called stun gloves are a relatively new and untested technology that can deliver an electric shock at a lower voltage than a taser.

**SPEAKER_3** (3:26)
As soon as you put it on my arm, I was absolutely convinced I went straight down to the mat. I didn't think about anything other than I wanted that pain to stop.

**Tracy Mumford** (3:33)
On the website of the company that makes them, Compliant Technologies, there's a testimonial from a police chief in Missouri who said he was sold after a demo where one of the gloves was used on him. He said the gloves, quote, look better on video than other tools used by law enforcement.
The plan for DHS to purchase the gloves comes as the agency has faced intense criticism for its aggressive tactics during the Trump administration's immigration crackdown. DHS didn't respond to questions from the Times about how the gloves would be used. Some civil rights advocates and former ICE officials said they found it troubling that officers could be equipped with a new tool that makes it easy to inflict pain.

**David Halbfinger** (4:21)
Since Sunday in the village of Kusra in the West Bank, two Palestinian families have just been trapped in their homes by a very violent band of Israeli settlers who have been attacking them really all year but now have taken up residence in a tent in the front yard of one of these homes and are just not letting anybody get in or out and are attacking people who do try.

**Tracy Mumford** (4:48)
My colleague David Halbfinger is covering the growing violence in the West Bank and the Israeli military's response.

**David Halbfinger** (4:55)
Security cameras have been recording much of this live and so we've been able to watch it in real time. We've seen rock throwing. We've seen the settlers just on Wednesday blocking the road leading to these homes with large boulders that they were throwing onto the road. And then we saw the soldiers who arrived on Wednesday to try to run them off actually being run off themselves, pulling out and leaving the settlers behind.