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:
(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.
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.
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