Selena Gomez posted a tearful video to her Instagram story on Monday in response to President Donald Trump’s administration’s immigration policies.
“I just want to say that I’m so sorry,” said the Grand Prairie-raised actress as she wiped tears from her eyes. Her story had an emoji with a Mexican flag.
“All my people are getting attacked — the children. I don’t understand.” She continued, “I wish I could do something, but I can’t. I don’t know what to do.”
In a follow-up post to her Instagram story, Gomez wrote, “Apparently it’s not okay to show empathy for people,” according to Variety.
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By late afternoon on Monday, both posts were taken down.
U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents detained 84 people of “varying degrees of criminality” from cities across North Texas on Sunday, according to a spokesperson for the agency. Protests against the ramped-up enforcement efforts took place across the D-FW area over the weekend.
Some were critical of Gomez’s posts on social media, including TV personality Piers Morgan, who wrote on X: “Posting yourself weeping over illegal immigrant criminals being deported is a new level of absurd celebrity narcissism.”
Gomez’s grandparents were undocumented immigrants who crossed the southern border from Mexico into the U.S. decades ago, she shared in a 2019 op-ed for Time magazine.
That same year, she produced Living Undocumented, a Netflix docuseries about eight undocumented families navigating the risk of deportation.
“Immigration goes beyond politics and headlines. It is a human issue, affecting real people, dismantling real lives. How we deal with it speaks to our humanity, our empathy, our compassion. How we treat our fellow human beings defines who we are,” she wrote in the Time piece.
In recent weeks, the actress has also made headlines for her role in Emilia Pérez, a musical crime film about a trans Mexican drug kingpin.
While the movie received critical acclaim at Cannes and won Best Motion Picture Musical or Comedy at the 2025 Golden Globe awards, it has courted controversy and ambivalence from some in the Mexican community over the depiction of cartel violence, Gomez’s ability to speak Spanish and casting choices (most of the actors are not from Mexico), according to The Associated Press, BBC and other news reports.
“Selena Gomez spoke such bad Spanish. There’s certain dialogue and certain expressions that we don’t use in Mexico,” said theatergoer Dora Pancardo to the AP outside a movie theater in Mexico City after watching the film.
“I’m not opposed to foreign artists making films about other countries, as long as they have good research, and EMILIA PÉREZ didn’t have that,” film critic Ana Iribe wrote on X in November.
