Selena Gomez is among the many Americans experiencing a rollercoaster of emotions in reaction to US President Trump’s latest actions regarding immigration.
As promised, the newly reinaugurated president has instructed immigration control to “crack down” on undocumented migrants, leading to nearly a thousand arrests on Sunday alone, per the BBC, a stark increase from the typical totals of the Biden years.
Those affected are not only from Mexico — deportation to Colombia is a whole issue in and of itself — but Gomez, who is Mexican American on her father’s side, seemed to have been especially moved by the difficulties faced by migrants from Mexico (the Mexican border is, as you probably know, an especially contentious point in the immigration conversation, and a focus of the last Trump administration).
On Monday 27 January, Gomez posted the Mexican flag emoji and the simple sentiment “I’m sorry” over a video in which she tearfully spoke out about the wave of arrests and deportations. “I just wanna say that I’m so sorry. All my people are getting attacked, the children. I don’t understand. I’m so sorry, I wish I could do something but I can’t. I don’t know what to do. I’ll try everything, I promise,” she said on Instagram Stories.
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A short while later she apparently deleted that story and replaced it with a black screen and the testy response, “Apparently it’s not ok to show empathy for people.”
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This is not the first time Selena Gomez has spoken out about the issues faced by undocumented residents. In 2019 the Emilia Pérez star executive-produced a Netflix documentary on the topic, Living Undocumented, and wrote a Time op-ed explaining her own family’s covert entry across the border.
In that piece she wrote, “Immigration is a divisive political issue…How we deal with it speaks to our humanity, our empathy, our compassion. How we treat our fellow human beings defines who we are.”
This article was originally published on GLAMOUR US.
