BREAKING🚨 A Somali man was chained, beaten, and denied food and water on an ICE deportation flight — and by the time it landed, his relatives say his body was covered in bruises.

BREAKING🚨 A Somali man was chained, beaten, and denied food and water on an ICE deportation flight — and by the time it landed, his relatives say his body was covered in bruises.

His relatives told The Charlotte Observer he was shackled at the wrists and ankles for the duration of the flight, unable to move, unable to eat, unable to drink. They say guards ignored his pleas. They say the restraints were never loosened once.

His family described what they were told in three words: chained, beaten, deprived.

They say he was one of many packed onto the aircraft, deported from the United States to a country many of these men had not lived in for years. Some, his relatives say, had spent much of their lives in America — built families here, worked here, raised children here — before being pulled onto a plane in restraints.

What his family keeps returning to is the physical condition he arrived in. Not a bureaucratic complaint. Bruises. Dehydration. A body that showed what happened on the flight.

Deportation flights operate largely out of public view. There are no reporters on board. No cameras. The only accounts that reach the outside world come from the people who survive the flight and the families waiting on the other end, comparing what they were promised with what they actually received.

His relatives say they raised the alarm because they were afraid no one else would. They say they were told he would be transported safely and humanely. They say the man who stepped off that plane told a different story with his own body.

ICE flights like this have faced complaints before of prolonged shackling, of men left in restraints for hours, of food and water withheld. Each time, the answer from the outside is the same silence, because the flights are sealed and the passengers have no way to record what happens to them.

His family is now asking a simple question: who is accountable for the condition he was in when the doors opened?

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