Claim: In a TikTok postwith over 800,000 views, a woman says, "They're throwing the deportees out of the planes and into the ocean. [...] they're shackling people, flying out into open ocean and throwing them out. The flight patterns, there is people tracking them on this app, the flights going out with the deportees. Watching them go out to the open ocean and circle back. A family in Italy saw five shackled bodies wash up on the shore." These claims have surgedon social media repeatedly in the past days.

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DW Fact check: Unproven While ICE does shackledeportees on flights during air operations, there has been no evidence to support the claim that people have been thrown out of planes. Starting with the statement on the flight patterns, it is possible to track live air traffic through services like Flightradar. However, no publicly available app specifically tracks the deportations in real time. The non-profit organization Witness at the Bordermonitors US policies on its borders and has tracked US deportation flights electronically since the COVID pandemic by using publicly available online databases. Immigration activist Tom Cartwrightwrites regular reports on where and how often deportation flights take place, which have become invaluable sources for major news outletssince ICE does not regularly provide such data. Some have called him the "go-to source for information about ICE flights" or "the leading expert in the field." Asking about flight tracking data being used to support the claim that deportees are being thrown from ICE flights into the ocean, Cartwright told DW: "These videos have no basis in fact. I have tracked over 40,000 ICE Air flights over 5 1/2 years and never have I seen anything that would even in a remote way support any of these spurious claims." We also did not find recent news stories of shackled bodies washing up on the shores of Italy. Five bodies with bound hands and feet found in Spanish waters last month were suspected to be migrants attempting to make the journey from North Africa to Europe.

Reviewed by Deutsche Welle ↗ · July 9, 2025