The role of the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has expanded under second term, as he declared a “national emergency” at the southern border and ended policies such as “catch and release.”
ICE has increased“arrests and removals” since Trump took office on January 20. According to the Department of Homeland Security (DHS),in Trump’s first 100 days, over 142,000 people were deported, though othershave disputed these numbers.
The intensified enforcement measures, including workplace raids and family separations, have triggered widespread protests. Most recently, there have been in after ICE raids in early June 2025.
ICE deportations have received much attention on social media. But some viral videos and posts share unproven, misleading and fake claims. investigates three of them.
Deportation flights drop deportees in the sea?
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.
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, there is no publicly available app that 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 inSpanish waters last month were suspected to be migrants attempting to make the journey from North Africa to Europe.
Mixed images from different migrants and refugees
Claim: A viral video on TikTokhas made similar claims as in the aforementioned video and includes six photographs that supposedly show the run-up to and the aftermath of deportations from the US.
DW Fact check: Misleading
Reverse image searches (here, here, here and here)show that only three of the six are linked to deportations carried out by ICE.
The bottom three are taken out of context. The first image on the bottom, supposedly showing bodies on a Spanish beach, was actually taken in Bangladesh on February 11, 2020. It shows rescue workers in blue gear carrying the body of a Rohingya refugee who died after a boat capsizing accident.
The photo above shows 74 bodies of migrants that washed ashore and were recovered by the Libyan Red Cross in Zawiyaon February 20, 2017.
The third photo was taken on February 14, 2023, in Qasr al-Akhyar, Libya, and shows the shoes of migrantswho died after their boat capsized.
The other three images at the very top, however, are linked to this year’s ICE operations to deport from the US.
The larger photo on the top, published by DHS on February 4, 2025, shows a handcuffed man being escorted to a cargo plane. He was reportedly a member of a criminal organization called Tren de Aragua and was being deported to Guantanamo Bay.
Another photo, taken on January 23, 2025, at Fort Bliss, Texas, shows undocumented migrants in shacklesbefore a deportation flight aboard a C-17 Globemaster III.
The last photo, dated February 5, 2025, shows an ICE arrest in a residential complexin Denver, Colorado.
Video allegedly showing ICE raid is created by AI
Claim: This post on TikTokwith 2.3 million views at the time of writing, allegedly shows a FOX newscast covering an ICE raid on a local produce farm where migrants are being detained.
DW Fact check: Fake
The video is shared by a TikTok account known to post a lot of on ICE. Most of these videos resemble newscasts, which are becoming
There are inconsistencies and illogical jumps in the video. For instance, people seem to run through each other, and parts of the footage get very blurry, unnatural and glitchy as people fall. Three seconds in, multiple people fall at the same time and become one large mass.
The officer then simply passes the group of people he was supposedly chasing mere seconds before. The audio also does not line up with what’s shown on screen.
In the bottom right corner, we can see the “Veo” watermark, indicating the video was created using Google’s advanced AI video generator.
Edited by: Sarah Steffen, Rachel Baig
The post Fact check: Three debunked claims about US deportations appeared first on Deutsche Welle.
