Since taking office again in January, Donald Trump’s administration has deported thousands on flights to countries in Latin America.
According to data from Witness at the Border, more than 600 deportation flights have taken off since Trump’s order earlier this year.
The sheer number of arrests in America and the increased aggressive tactics by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) have sparked outrage among Americans and others.
Immigration raids in Los Angeles last month caused intense backlash, causing the city to introduce a curfew and prompting Trump to deploy the National Guard.
Trump was slammed for deporting many of these migrants without a fair trial, to which he replied: ‘You can’t have a trial for all of these people.
‘Look, we are getting some very bad people, killers, murderers, drug dealers, really bad people, the mentally ill, the mentally insane, they emptied out insane asylums into our country, we’re getting them out.
‘And a judge can’t say: ‘No, you have to have a trial,’” Trump claimed. ‘No, we are going to have a very dangerous country if we are not allowed to do what we are entitled to do.’
As tensions continue to boil over, some TikTokers have begun making outlandish claims about where the migrant flights went.
One TikToker said: ‘ICE says they deport people safely, but why
do they use expensive military cargo planes that don’t always land?
‘Why are shackled bodies washing up in Europe? Why are
immigrants being taken to countries that aren’t their own? And why are fake agents abducting immigrants? We need answers.’
Shackled bodies ‘washing up in Europe’
Let’s unpack these claims.
The reference to shackled bodies washing up in Europe – Spain, specifically – are migrants from Algeria, authorities have said.
Police in Majorca opened an investigation to identify the bodies, but say they were likely handcuffed and thrown in the ocean during a ‘confrontation’ onboard.
Decomposition and lack of DNA evidence have made the identification process of these bodies more difficult, they say.
Claims from TikTokers that these bodies could be the migrants they claim the US are ‘throwing into the ocean’ are not only likely false, but also implausible.
Even if a body from the Gulf of Mexico were to wash all the way to Spain, by the time it reached there, if at all, it would have been completely decomposed, eaten by animals or, more likely, already at the bottom of the ocean.
There haven’t been reports of shackled bodies found on the shores of Mexico, America, or nearby islands in the Gulf.
Trump’s deportations in numbers
Arrests by ICE have increased 25% since Trump took office.
By the end of April, an estimated 139,000 migrants had been deported from the United States, according to the Department of Homeland Security.
Eerie parallels to infamous ‘Death Flights’
There is no evidence to suggest the Trump administration is throwing deportees off planes into the sea.
But it has happened before in other countries.
Between 1976 and 1983, thousands of dissidents under Argentina’s dictatorship disappeared.
Many of them were murdered in ‘Death Flights’ – which are exactly what they sound like. Hundreds of flights took off between 1977 and 1978 alone.
The military would round up dissidents and put them on flights over the ocean, often drugged, and throw them into the sea.
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