What We Know About a Viral Video That Claims ICE is Throwing Deported Immigrants Off Planes and Into the Ocean

Fact Check

  • by: Uliana Malashenko
What We Know About a Viral Video That Claims ICE is Throwing Deported Immigrants Off Planes and Into the Ocean What We Know

Did a TikTok video shared widely in July 2025 accurately claim that shackled bodies found in Europe were deportees from the U.S. that ICE had dropped into the ocean from planes? Here's what we know: Lead Stories has so far found no evidence to support that shocking claim. Initial reports in Spain were that police believed the corpses were North African migrants who had died while attempting to cross into the country on boats.

The claim appeared in a video (archived here) published on TikTok on June 30, 2025, under the caption:

I'm not going to shut my mouth.

The speaker says:

Guys, they're throwing the deportees out of the planes and into the ocean. No, this is not a drill. No, this is not fear mongering. They're shackling people, flying out into open ocean and throwing them out. Okay, the flight patterns -- there's people tracking them on this app, the flights going out with the deportees, watching them go out to open ocean and circle back. A family in Italy saw five shackled bodies wash up on the shore...

This is what the video looked like on TikTok at the time of writing:

Screenshot 2025-07-02 at 2.12.45 PM.png

(Source: TikTok screenshot by Lead Stories)

Lead Stories has not found any evidence to support the claim that ICE was executing immigrants by throwing them off deportation flights, nor to support the subsidiary claims that flight trackers showed clear evidence of deportation flights circling around over large bodies of water, or that shackled bodies found in Europe in the summer of 2025 were the victims of such actions.

A search across Google News (archived here) for the words "shackled", "bodies" and "Italy" yielded no relevant results.

However, the speaker may have been referring to a different story in Spain. According to regional daily Diario de Mallorca (archived here), over the course of roughly a month in the summer of 2025, at least five bodies, discovered with their hands and feet tied, washed ashore on the Balearic Islands.

The news outlet reported that local law enforcement believed that the deceased could have been migrants from North Africa who had been attempting to cross Mediterranean by boat.

On the claim that flight trackers had zeroed in on deportation flights that had circled around in the middle of the ocean, Tom Cartwright (archived here), a retired financial executive who has been tracking deportation flights since Trump's first presidency and whose data has been used by major media organizations (archived here), told Lead Stories via email on July 2, 2025:

Based on my work and observations this is all garbage.

He added that "no such app exists" to track all deportation flights in real time. When asked if he observed any unusual circular movements over the ocean, Cartwright said:
I see all deportation flight paths and - NO.

Lead Stories reached out to the Spanish Civil Guard about their investigation into the discovery of the corpses, but we did not receive an immediate response.

Lead Stories also contacted ICE, but didn't immediately receive a response.

If we obtain any further relevant information, we will update this story accordingly.

Read more

Other Lead Stories concerning current events in the United States are here.

Want to inform others about the accuracy of this story?

See who is sharing it (it might even be your friends...) and leave the link in the comments.:


  Uliana Malashenko

Uliana Malashenko joined Lead Stories as a freelance fact checking reporter in March 2022. Since then, she has investigated viral claims about U.S. elections and international conflicts in Gaza and Ukraine, among many other things. Before Lead Stories she spent over a decade working in broadcast and digital journalism, specializing in covering breaking news and politics. She is based in New York.

Read more about or contact Uliana Malashenko

About Us

EFCSN International Fact-Checking Organization

Lead Stories is a fact checking website that is always looking for the latest false, misleading, deceptive or inaccurate stories, videos or images going viral on the internet.
Spotted something? Let us know!.

Lead Stories is a:


WhatsApp Tipline

Have a tip or a question? Chat with our friendly robots on WhatsApp!

Add our number +1 (404) 655-4223, follow this link or scan the image below with your phone:

@leadstories

Subscribe to our newsletter

* indicates required

Please select all the ways you would like to hear from Lead Stories LLC:

You can unsubscribe at any time by clicking the link in the footer of our emails. For information about our privacy practices, please visit our website.

We use Mailchimp as our marketing platform. By clicking below to subscribe, you acknowledge that your information will be transferred to Mailchimp for processing. Learn more about Mailchimp's privacy practices here.

Most Read

Most Recent

Share your opinion