Fashion
Selena Gomez’s Deleted Post Becomes a Political Talking Point
An Instagram video in which the actress was seen crying over arrests of undocumented immigrants led to criticism from various political figures.
On Monday, a day after Immigration and Customs Enforcement said in a statement that it had made 956 arrests as part of President Trump’s crackdown on undocumented immigrants, the actress and singer Selena Gomez posted an Instagram video to her 422 million followers in which she discussed the situation while crying.
She has since deleted the original post, but its short run online created quite a stir, with Mr. Trump’s “border czar” and numerous political commentators weighing in. One of the commentators called for Ms. Gomez, who was born in Texas, to be deported.
Immigration is a subject personal to Ms. Gomez, a star of the television show “Only Murders in the Building” and the Oscar-nominated film “Emilia Pérez.” In 2019, she wrote an essay for Time magazine in which she reflected on being the granddaughter of undocumented immigrants from Mexico who eventually gained U.S. citizenship. Her aunt, she said, crossed the border hidden in the back of a truck. Her father was born in the United States.
“Immigration is a divisive political issue,” Ms. Gomez wrote. “But immigration goes beyond politics and headlines. It is a human issue, affecting real people, dismantling real lives.”
In 2017, Ms. Gomez was an executive producer on the Netflix documentary “Living Undocumented,” which looked at the lives of eight families living in the United States. “I watched footage outlining their deeply personal journeys and I cried,” Ms. Gomez wrote in the Time essay. “It captured the shame, uncertainty and fear I saw my own family struggle with.”
With Mr. Trump quickly fulfilling his campaign promise to ramp up arrests and deportations of undocumented immigrants, Ms. Gomez was again moved to tears, this time on social media.
