It’s come to this: pain gloves.
Just when President Trump’s efforts to deport immigrants his administration deems not the right kind — and you’re deluding yourself if you think it’s all about legality — news came this week that Immigration and Customs Enforcement wants to spend up to $20 million on electrically charged gloves so that its agents can more easily subdue people.
All they got to do is fiddle around on their gloves a la Iron Man to turn them on, place their hands on the local fruit lady or taco guy, and voilà! The person crumbles to the ground and gets hauled off to the hoosegow.
The official notice announcing the planned purchase describe the equipment as “a Conductive Distraction and De-escalation Device,” but let’s call it what it is:
Pain gloves. And: Cowardly.
The malicious mitts are just one item in the shopping cart of a xenophobic spending spree that the Trump administration can indulge in thanks in a new budget for immigration enforcement approved by Congress this June that exceeds the military spending of most countries. In August alone, a toxic alphabet soup of agencies — ICE, CBP, HSI, CIS and others — put out notices that they plan to spend up to $1.8 billion to shore themselves up.
Included in the wish list: $3 million on 9 mm Luger ammunition and $2 million for Glock pistols and accompanying modifications; $1 million for the renovation and rental of indoor firing ranges; $2 million in defibrillators. Over $100 million toward “Nonscheduled Chartered Passenger Air Transportation” just for immigrants who choose to self-deport. Over $300 million for new Border Patrol stations to replace three existing ones in Texas. A five-year contract worth up to $50 million to create Border Patrol propaganda “across various media channels.”
And just in case any of this weighs on the hearts and minds of Border Patrol higher-ups, the agency wants to spend up to $1 million for “four quarterly, five-day wellness workshops” at its headquarters emphasizing “nutrition, sleep hygiene, stress management” and other mental health issues.
May I suggest a workshop on growing a conscience? Maybe one on how not to crash out when protesters or witnesses pull out a phone to shoot video, as is their constitutional right? Or how about a PowerPoint presentation simply called “How Not to Act Like a Goon With a Badge”?
So now that pain gloves are on the menu, what’s next for Trump’s deportation deluge? Uniforms that sprouts porcupine quills at the tug of a collar? Spider-Man web-slinging capabilities? Magneto-type helmets so activists can’t read the minds of la migra? (Actually, that’s kind of happening: ICE wants to spend up to $1 million in helmets for a new tactical team called DAGr, which also wants $1 million to buy night vision goggles.)
“Every decision is made with careful consideration and appropriately reviewed to make sure that any technology ICE utilizes is consistent with all applicable law enforcement policies and standards,” Homeland Security told the Times in justifying the gloves, which its makers caution shouldn’t be used on children, pregnant women or folks with heart conditions. “Our officers are highly trained in de-escalation techniques.”
Excuse me while I collapse — not from some migra man buzzing me with their new toy, but from laughter.
In this Jan. 12, 2021, file photo, President Donald Trump tours a section of the U.S.-Mexico border wall in Alamo, Texas.
(Alex Brandon/Associated Press)
Trump has spent all of his second term trying to equip and fashion immigration agents as a new warrior class, and they have responded accordingly. His wannabe Robocops launch indiscriminate raids, operate detention facilities under conditions out of a Dickens novel and regularly don face masks to hide their identities. They toss out racial slurs to ridicule detainees the way the rest of us use nouns, threaten bystanders with guns for looking at them funny and even arrest American citizens who they think got in their way or they mistook for someone in the country illegally.
But this tyrannical posturing reminds me not of some low-rent X-Men film but rather Syndrome, the villain in the Pixar classic “The Incredibles.”
The dweeb so desperately wanted to be a superhero that he launches a war against real ones in order to turn their powers into weapons he then sells to a gullible public. Syndrome eventually captures the animated film’s titular Mr. Incredible and tells him how he’s going to unleash a monster on a city so Syndrome can save residents and thus earn the public accolades he so desperately wanted to receive.
“I’ll be a bigger hero than you ever were!” Syndrome boasts to Mr. Incredible.
Spoiler alert: He wasn’t. And neither will Trump’s borderlands berzerkers.
Despite more immigrants being arrested in July than any other month in Homeland Security’s history, good Americans refuse to submit to Trump’s roundup reverie. That gets him and his agents mad. The man who orders monuments to himself like a North Korean dictator only thinks he’s a king — or a God — but the cruelty Trump is willing to unleash is all too real.
And, always, beware tyrants who are scared.
That’s why those electrified gloves that ICE want are so telling.
It’s an acknowledgment that agents can’t effectively do their job. It shows how the Trump administration really thinks anyone who opposes them is little better than livestock in need of a cattle prod. It’s a bully confessing that he’s scared.
God knows, Trump must have gotten an advance order of the pain gloves for his itty bitty hands almost two years ago the way he’s been inflicting hurt and ignominy on our country ever since.
It’s the coward’s way. It’s cruel and juvenile. And Americans best take heed of a manchild president and his band of thugs at all levels of government who embody that line from “King Lear”:
“As flies to wanton boys are we to the gods. They kill us for their sport.”
