September 1, 2026
SACRAMENTO — In the final days of its legislative session, California moved to ban a piece of equipment most of the public had never heard of a month ago: the electric shock glove, a Taser-like device that delivers an electric shock through direct contact rather than a fired probe. The Department of Homeland Security’s response arrived within hours — it does not intend to follow the law.
The bill, AB 2760, was introduced by Assemblymember LaShae Sharp-Collins of San Diego only a week before the session’s deadline, advanced through a fast-track process known as a “gut and amend,” in which lawmakers strip an unrelated bill and rewrite it entirely. It would bar both state and local law enforcement, as well as federal agents operating in California, from using any wearable electroshock device, and would block California police departments from buying the gloves with state funds.
The urgency was not abstract. U.S. Sen. Alex Padilla and other congressional Democrats wrote to DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin last week urging the department to cancel a contract to supply the gloves to Immigration and Customs Enforcement, calling them “hand-worn tasers disguised as restraint equipment.” Reports that ICE intended to purchase thousands of the devices next year, as part of the administration’s broader immigration enforcement buildup, gave Sacramento Democrats a narrow window to act before the equipment reaches the field.
DHS did not wait for the ink to dry before rejecting the law’s authority. “California’s sanctuary politicians do not control federal law enforcement,” a department spokesperson said in a statement, framing the bill as an unconstitutional overreach into an agency that answers to Washington, not Sacramento.
That posture is now familiar. When Newsom signed a first-of-its-kind law banning ICE agents from wearing masks during operations, DHS responded almost identically: “We will NOT comply with Gavin Newsom’s unconstitutional mask ban,” the department posted, citing what it described as a surge in assaults on agents — a figure that has shifted repeatedly, from 300 percent in the spring to 1,000 percent by late summer, without the underlying data to substantiate it. The shock-glove standoff appears headed for the same posture: a state law on the books, a federal agency publicly declaring it will ignore it, and no clear mechanism forcing resolution short of a courtroom.
The fight split predictably along law-enforcement lines within the state, too. Civil rights advocates called the gloves a public-safety hazard in their own right. “Electroshock gloves by any law enforcement agency makes Californians less safe,” said Anallely Martin of the California Immigrant Policy Center. The California State Sheriffs’ Association opposed the bill on different grounds, arguing it would strip officers of a lower-harm alternative to firearms without meaningfully constraining federal agents, who the association’s lobbyist noted are unlikely to comply regardless. Republican state Sen. Tony Strickland made a similar point on the floor: if a shock glove is safer than a gun, he argued, lawmakers should not be taking it off the table.
The gloves themselves have drawn separate scrutiny on medical grounds, with reporting noting they may raise the risk of sudden cardiac death in people already under physical stress during an arrest.
For Sacramento, the shock-glove bill is one entry in a longer list this session: banning the hiring of former ICE agents for many state and local jobs, barring arrests of people traveling to or from immigration court hearings, and a 25 percent tax on income earned by companies operating detention centers. Assemblymember Mark Gonzalez of Los Angeles framed the package as a statement of protection for the estimated 27 percent of Californians born outside the country. “We are here to defend you,” he said.
Whether that defense holds up against a federal government that has already signaled it will not recognize the state’s authority is the open question hanging over all of it. California can pass the law. It cannot, on its own, make ICE follow it — and DHS’s early answer to AB 2760, delivered before Newsom had even signed it, suggests Sacramento already knows that.
Human-Directed AI Journalism: This article was produced under editorial direction and review by The Navarro Report using AI-assisted research and drafting.