One week into Donald Trump’s presidency, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) is earnestly arresting and deporting illegal migrants. Cue the celebrity tears.
On Instagram, singer and actress Selena Gomez released a sorrowful — to say the absolute least — video of herself ugly crying over news of the ICE arrests.
“I just want to 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,” Gomez sobbed.
Gomez was summarily roasted online, with people accusing her of being disingenuous and putting on a show — including Trump’s new border czar, Tom Homan.
Speaking to Fox News, Homan essentially told Gomez to calm down: “We’ve arrested public safety threats and national security threats, bottom line.… We’re going to do this job and we’re going to enforce the laws of this country. If they don’t like it, then go to Congress and change the law.”
Trump’s orders, and Homan’s response, are not inherently Republican, Democratic, left or right — or partisan in any way. Gomez, insofar as the public has seen, was not moved to tears in 2014 when then-U.S. president Barack Obama issued a near-identical ultimatum to illegal migrants.
At the time, Congress had failed to pass a bipartisan immigration bill. In lieu of the bill’s passing, Obama addressed the nation by announcing the steps he had the legal authority, as president, to take to address the country’s “broken” immigration system.
He decreed that he would deport illegal immigrants who had been in the country for less than five years — migrants who, according to Obama, “flout the rules” and “may be dangerous.”
The president said that, “If you’re a criminal, you’ll be deported. If you plan to enter the U.S. illegally, your chances of getting caught and sent back just went up. The actions I’m taking are not only lawful, they’re the kinds of actions taken by every single Republican president and every single Democratic president for the past half century.”
In 2019, Gomez penned an essay on immigration for Time magazine, highlighting the stories of migrant families living in the U.S. “I don’t claim to be an expert. I’m not a politician, I’m not a doctor and I don’t work in the system at all,” she wrote. She must have forgotten that bit when she recorded herself crying this week.
Gomez’s reaction video, which has since been deleted, could not have been more tone deaf. As Homan rightly pointed out, Gomez shed no tears regarding the unknown whereabouts of the (disputed) number of unaccompanied migrant children who have crossed the U.S. border, many of whom are feared to have been trafficked into prostitution or child labour.
Karla Jacinto, a survivor of child sex trafficking who helped convince Congress to pass anti-trafficking legislation in 2016, is but one victim of the large-scale, and largely unaddressed, criminal tragedy that is illegal migration.
Gomez is the granddaughter of Mexican migrants. Her grandparents illegally crossed the border to the U.S. in the 1970s, and Gomez was born a U.S. citizen in 1992. She has had a lucky life: to be American, beautiful, talented and wildly successful is a version of the American dream that few of her fellow citizens will ever realize.
Surely Gomez recognizes that not every Mexican migrant can fit into her country, let alone become as prosperous, famous and wealthy as she is. Alas, life is not always fair, and not everyone is born in the right place or at the right time. Not everyone can count on illegal immigration to obtain the life they want to live.
Gomez could have taken a hint from the abysmal viewership of the Emmy Awards in recent years: we don’t care about celebrities’ political views. We care even less when those views are woke or out-of-touch with reality. We don’t want to hear it in your acceptance speech, or from your living room couch.
This is not to say that celebrities should not enjoy freedom of speech. It is merely to say that the public has quite decisively shown how little we care for being lectured at by wealthy music or theatre grads. We are not looking at you to be our moral compass. And if you behave as though you are, well, we are wont to find your art as intolerable as your bad opinions. Is that worth the risk?
Please just be quiet and entertain us, Selena Gomez.
National Post