California has approved a law prohibiting local, state and federal law enforcement officers from using gloves capable of delivering painful electric shocks to people.
The legislation, signed by California Governor Gavin Newsom on Tuesday, will take effect next year and remain in force until 2030.
The move comes weeks after US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) began plans to equip its officers with the devices, which are intended to help officers control combative individuals. Last month, the agency awarded a contract worth nearly $17m for the purchase of 6,000 pairs of the gloves.
Reacting to the legislation, Newsom criticised the Trump administration’s immigration enforcement policies.
“Trump has put his political interests above the health, safety and livelihood of American families,” Gavin Newsom, California’s governor, said in a statement after signing the law. “California is taking action to strengthen transparency, accountability, and oversight around immigration enforcement in our state.”
The legislation is part of a wider effort by Democratic-led states to respond to President Donald Trump’s immigration enforcement policies.
In California, lawmakers have introduced at least two dozen measures this year aimed at strengthening protections for immigrants, limiting cooperation between state authorities and federal immigration officers and imposing tighter rules on immigrant detention facilities.
Across the US, 17 states with Democratic-led legislatures have passed more than 100 bills supporting immigrant protections this year, according to an Associated Press analysis using Plural, a bill-tracking software. Limiting cooperation with federal immigration authorities has been the most common objective among the measures.
California Democratic Assembly member LaShae Sharp-Collins, who introduced the shock-gloves bill, said the legislation was intended to temporarily halt the use of the devices while their possible risks are examined.
The law directs the state’s Justice Department to investigate the safety of shock gloves and submit its findings to lawmakers by 2029.
“There’s a lot of unrest and a lot of uncertainty,” she said in an interview. “A lot of people are scared.”
The legislation could also trigger another legal dispute over California’s authority to impose restrictions on federal immigration officers.
Earlier this year, a federal judge blocked California’s first-in-the-nation law restricting federal officers from wearing face coverings, ruling that it was too selective because it applied to local and federal officers while exempting state law enforcement.
California lawmakers subsequently approved another bill extending the face-covering restriction to all officers, which Newsom signed.
Kevin Johnson, a professor emeritus at the University of California, Davis School of Law, said courts could eventually determine that California lacks the authority to prevent federal officers from using shock gloves or face coverings.
He argued that such restrictions could conflict with the supremacy clause of the US Constitution, which generally establishes federal law as superior to conflicting state laws.
“The state has very limited, if any, powers in dictating to the federal government how its officers are armed,” he said.
Sacramento County Sheriff Jim Cooper, a Democrat and former state lawmaker, also criticised the shock-gloves ban, arguing that the devices are among the non-lethal tools available to officers when necessary.
“When the federal government does something, the state legislature wants to ban it,” he said at a news conference. “They’re making our job harder.”
Sharp-Collins said ICE’s decision to acquire the gloves prompted her legislation. However, she also pointed to their reported use by other law enforcement agencies.
She cited a 2024 case in which a Kentucky family alleged that a man died after being subjected to repeated tasering and electric shocks from the gloves while in law enforcement custody.
Meanwhile, California state Senator Scott Wiener, a San Francisco Democrat who authored the earlier face-covering legislation, also sponsored the bill extending the ban to state officers.
“California must use every available tool to stand up for our communities under attack from ICE’s secret police terror campaign,” he said in a statement after it passed the legislature.
