The White House says many ICE arrests labeled "noncriminal" by the Washington Post and New York Times involve MS-13 members and foreign fugitives.
Page A4From§Eachthe noon edition — 1 September 2026
White House Denies ICE Arrests Are 'Soaring,' Agency Spent $16.7 Million On Shock Gloves
As it ran on the front
Excuse me, I wrote this down somewhere — hang on, here it is. The White House put out a statement this week saying media claims that noncriminal ICE arrests are 'soaring' are false narratives. They brought receipts, they said. I appreciate that, I really do, because I've got a receipt too, and it's for something else entirely.
Six thousand. That's the number that keeps bothering me. Six thousand electric shock gloves, $16.7 million, purchased by the same agency that's telling us the arrest numbers aren't soaring. I keep coming back to that number because it doesn't fit with a smaller number of arrests. My wife, she does the shopping in our house, and when she buys six thousand of anything — well, we don't buy six thousand of anything, but if she did, I'd ask what she was planning on doing with all of it.…
…(cont) I did a little demonstration at home, just to walk myself through it. I laid out a dozen work gloves on the kitchen table, the regular kind, one pair per hand, and I tried to figure out how many hands that comes to. A dozen pairs, twenty-four gloves, twelve people. Six thousand gloves — I did the math twice because I don't trust myself with big numbers — that's three thousand people, gloved up, at minimum, assuming nobody needs a spare.
House Democrats want to know the same thing I do, which is why. Not why gloves — gloves I understand, this is dangerous work, I'm not naive about that. Why that many. Why now. Why the number goes up right when the agency insists the underlying numbers are staying flat, or going down, or whatever the receipts they brought actually said.
I read the statement three times. It says the arrest figures are a false narrative. It doesn't say anything about the gloves. Two documents, same week, same agency, and one of them is a denial and one of them is a purchase order, and they're sitting right next to each other in my notebook, not fitting together no matter how I turn the page.
Oh, and — one more thing, before you go. If the arrests aren't soaring, what's the six thousand for?
“They deny the arrests are 'soaring' in the same breath they're stocking up on six-thousand shock gloves — you don't buy that much restraint gear for a program that's shrinking. That's the tell: the receipts prove the story they're calling false. Sixteen-point-seven million dollars says otherwise.”
“The White House statement speaks for itself — those are noncriminal arrest figures being mischaracterized by irresponsible reporting, full stop. The glove purchase is a separate procurement matter, entirely unrelated to enforcement volume, it's — well, it is enforcement equipment, so — that's not what I meant to say, forget the volume point, it's about officer safety.”
The receipts
Democrats on the House Committee on Homeland Security on Monday expressed their “strong opposition” to the Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s (ICE) plans to spend up to $20 million on electric shock gloves for their agents. ICE awarded a $16.7 million contract with Compliant Technologies LLC for 6,000 of the company’s Generated Low…
This page is a back-issue: the story as it ran, receipts as they were. The current edition is at the front.