Trump's ICE Deportations, Bodies Found in the Mediterranean
Bound bodies keep washing up on Mediterranean beaches. Shackled migrants keep vanishing from U.S. custody.
There are some stories that arrive at your doorstep with an eerie synchronicity. On the same weekend that The Times confirmed the Trump administration’s use of military cargo planes to deport shackled migrants, five corpses washed ashore in the Mediterranean—bound at the wrists and ankles, bloated and silent, tethered in death to each other and to something far more sinister.
The official line is clear: these are unrelated events. One occurred under the jurisdiction of the United States government, the other off the tourist-packed beaches of Majorca, where European authorities attribute the deaths to “human trafficking gone wrong.” That’s a familiar script, one the public is conditioned to accept.
But we live in an era when scripts can’t be trusted. Institutions have been gutted, oversight mechanisms dismantled, and a culture of plausible deniability now shields even the most grotesque abuses from meaningful accountability.
So we must ask: what happens when governments stop watching, and the extremists they’ve empowered start moving in the dark?
This investigation does not claim causation—but it demands correlation be taken seriously. Because the math is adding up.
Shackles in the Sky
On June 29, The Times reported that migrants detained by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) are now being shackled—at the waist, wrists, and ankles—and loaded onto military cargo planes for deportation.
Not commercial airliner or chartered flights. Cargo planes. Specifically, models like the Lockheed C-130 or C-17 Globemaster—aircraft designed for war, not human transport. Planes with rear ramps that can open mid-flight. Planes that are not designed with pressurized cabins for passengers. Planes where shackled migrants are seated with no formal emergency protocol, no clear evacuation plan, no press present to witness the process. And more importantly—no oversight.
You don’t use military planes unless you want it hidden. It’s louder. It’s harder to photograph. There’s no passenger manifest that a journalist can FOIA. They’re not transporting people. They’re disappearing them.
ICE maintains that restraints are necessary for “safety,” a claim repeatedly contradicted by human rights organizations, flight attendants, and deportees themselves.
In a 2024 case filed with the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, a Honduran asylum seeker described being zip-tied to another man for nine hours with no bathroom access and no explanation of where he was going.
The Bodies That Surfaced
Just days before The Times report, Spanish authorities announced a grim discovery: five decomposed bodies had washed ashore on the beaches of Majorca. Their wrists and ankles were bound. Some wore life vests. None carried identification. According to the LBC, this brings the total to 31 bodies recovered from Majorca’s coast since January 2025.
Local investigators believe the dead were migrants, likely originating from Algeria, attempting the perilous sea crossing to Spain—a journey often facilitated by human traffickers. But even among these dangerous voyages, one thing stood out: the shackles.
Smugglers may tie people up to maintain control, but we rarely see this many bodies arrive in such a similar condition. The bindings suggest premeditated restraint, not accident.
The forensic report on the five most recent corpses is still pending. Spanish officials insist there’s no evidence of foul play beyond the restraints. But absence of proof is not proof of absence—especially when tied hands keep surfacing.
So again, we ask: Who shackles a person expected to swim?
Oversight Collapsed by Design
What makes these events more than a tragic coincidence is the landscape in which they’re occurring.
Since returning to office in 2025, Donald Trump has systematically dismantled nearly every internal check on executive power—beginning with the removal of 19 inspectors general across federal agencies— including the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), under which ICE operates.
The inspectors general are the people tasked with catching fraud, abuse, and rights violations inside these agencies. With them gone, no one’s watching.
This administration has weaponized the federal bureaucracy to shield itself from accountability. The removal of these watchdogs is obstruction in plain sight.
But the problem goes even deeper than audits. Earlier this spring, Trump initiated a sweeping reshuffle of military leadership—replacing senior generals and admirals with ideological loyalists.
Critics warned that the purge resembled “pre-coup behavior,” noting that multiple replacements had publicly pledged support for Trump’s mass deportation agenda and openly dismissed the idea of civilian restraint.
We now have a military chain of command willing to carry out unconstitutional orders. That’s the real emergency—and the public’s not paying attention.
Silence as Policy, Plausibility as Strategy
To be clear: no official evidence currently links ICE’s deportation practices with the bodies found off Majorca. But silence does not exonerate. Silence obscures. And in a political ecosystem where extremist militias, rogue operatives, and paramilitary contractors have been legitimized, we cannot ignore what may be happening in the shadows.
We’ve seen this playbook before:
In 1970s Chile, the Pinochet regime used military helicopters to conduct “death flights,” pushing political dissidents out over the Pacific Ocean.
Argentina’s Dirty War employed similar methods, sedating prisoners before dropping them—bound and gagged—from planes into the Río de la Plata.
Today, America partners with private contractors like GEO Group and MVM Inc. for detention and deportation. These corporations operate with impunity, shrouded by “proprietary protection,” which shields their methods from public inquiry. And when a plane leaves U.S. soil carrying shackled human beings, who exactly is accountable for what happens next?
What happens if it doesn’t land?
Migrant Lives and the Banality of State Violence
it would be easy—comfortable, even—to dismiss this story as a stretch. To rationalize the shackles, downplay the drownings, trust that “someone somewhere” is monitoring it all.
But this is how atrocities sneak into history—not as explosions, but as administrative policy, paperwork, and a thousand little shrugs.
Migrant deaths have long been treated as background noise in Western democracies. In the Trump administration’s first term, over 1,200 migrants died in U.S. custody. A report by Amnesty International found that ICE routinely failed to provide medical care, psychological support, or basic nutrition to detainees—often with fatal results.
The second term has gone further. Deportation is now treated as a demonstration of state power. Shackles aren’t just restraints. They’re symbols, warnings, spectacles.
And now, perhaps, evidence.
⚠️ What Demands Our Attention ⚠️
We are not claiming a conspiracy. We are demanding transparency.
❏⎯ What oversight exists for ICE Air operations under this administration?
❏⎯ Who approves the use of military aircraft to transport civilians?
❏⎯ What protocols are there when deportees die in transit?
❏⎯ Where are there logs for these flights? Are they public?
❏⎯ Why are people showing up in the Mediterranean, shackled?
❏⎯ Why do we not have names for the 31 bodies that have washed ashore?
The answers may reveal a policy that stops just short of state-sanctioned violence. Or they may uncover something darker. But to ignore the question and to just accept coincidence as a substitute for scrutiny is to forfeit what little power the public still has.
The Sound of the Shackles
We are not imagining the clinking. The chains are real and the silence is deafening. The dots are not connected—yet—but they are there, and they are forming a shape. History will judge how long we looked away before we let it happen again.
Because the question isn’t whether atrocities are happening. The question is whether we’ll notice them in time to stop the next one.
And if we don’t the sea will return them. Bound, bloated, silent. But never unrelated.
Sources & Further Reading
The Times – “Migrants Put in Shackles for Trump Deportation Flights”
LBC UK – “Majorca Horror as Five Shackled Bodies Found Floating off Tourist Hotspot”
Amnesty International USA – “USA: ‘You Don’t Have Any Rights Here’: Illegal Pushbacks, Arbitrary Detention & Ill-Treatment of Asylum-Seekers” (2023 report)
ProPublica – “Inside ICE’s Secretive Air Transport Division”
https://www.propublica.org/article/ice-air-deportation-flightsThe Inter-American Commission on Human Rights – “Precautionary Measures for Migrants in U.S. Detention”
Reuters – “Trump Removes Multiple Inspectors General, Prompting Oversight Concerns”
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-trump-inspectors/trump-removes-watchdogs-raises-alarm-on-oversight-idUSKBN22O02CLawfare Blog – “The Purge of Inspectors General and the Decline of Institutional Accountability”
https://www.lawfareblog.com/purge-inspectors-generalThe Atlantic – “Trump’s War on the Generals”
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2025/04/trump-generals-purge/678392/Human Rights Watch – “The Dehumanizing Logic of Deportation Flights”
https://www.hrw.org/news/2023/10/12/deportation-flights-human-rightsThe Guardian – “31 Migrant Bodies Found Off Majorca in 2025 Amid Surge in Mediterranean Deaths”
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/jun/29/migrant-bodies-majorca-mediterraneanThe Nation – “GEO Group and the Architecture of American Deportation”
https://www.thenation.com/article/politics/geo-group-ice-deportation/Center for Migration Studies – “Deaths at the Border: The Human Cost of U.S. Immigration Enforcement”
https://cmsny.org/publications/deaths-at-the-border-report/History.com – “Argentina’s Dirty War and the Origins of Death Flights”
https://www.history.com/news/dirty-war-argentina-disappearancesBBC News Archive – “Pinochet and the Death Flights of Chile’s Regime”
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-latin-america-47039804
Excellent article. However, the links regarding the deportation flights and disappeared people, regarding Trump's hiding facts, several of the listed links are gone. "Not found." Are you being censored by the administration? I would not be surprised.
Let's not forget the role of the US in establishing these dictatorships in LATAM...