White House Video Targets Selena Gomez’s Tearful Reaction to Mass Deportations

Days after Selena Gomez posted a tearful video reacting to the brutal mass deportations happening across the country — then swiftly removed it — the White House released a video using her emotions against her. On Thursday, the Trump administration shared interviews with three women whose children were allegedly killed by undocumented people as they reacted to Gomez’s post.

“What about our children who were brutally murdered and raped and beat to death,” said Tammy Nobles, who said her daughter was killed by a former MS-13 gang member in the clip. “You don’t know who you’re crying for.”

“There are many other children whose lives were taken due to people who crossed here illegally,” said Alexis Nungary, who spoke at a Trump rally during his campaign last year.

In between the interviews, the White House spliced clips of Gomez’s Instagram video in which she tearfully reacted to Trump’s attack on immigrants. “I’m so sorry, I wish I could do something but I can’t. I don’t know what to do,” Gomez says in her video, amid tears.

In the replies to the White House post, fans defended Gomez, saying she was “crying for those who work hard for a better life and for those whose basic human rights are being violated while being deported with their children,” wrote one fan on X.

A rep for Selena Gomez did not immediately respond to Rolling Stone‘s request for comment.

Since taking office, Trump has stayed true to his promise to target undocumented Americans, touting the number of people ICE has rounded up thus far on social media. It’s a promise he made while campaigning for president, claiming he’d initiate mass deportations as soon as he took the oath of office.

Despite Trump’s focus on families of those killed by people without documents, a study conducted by the Texas Department of Public Safety and funded by the National Institute of Justice last year found that undocumented immigrants had the lowest offending rates overall for both total felony crime and violent felony crime compared to other groups. (That study, done with federal funding, has now been wiped from the Institute of Justice‘s website.)

Gomez, who is Mexican American, has long supported immigrant rights. In 2019, she hosted a show called Living Undocumented, highlighting the experiences of several immigrant families fearing ICE deportations. That year, she also wrote an op-ed for Time that discussed her aunt’s own journey crossing the U.S.-Mexico order “hidden in the back of the truck” in the early Nineties.

“I’m concerned about the way people are being treated in my country,” she wrote at the time. “As a Mexican-American woman I feel a responsibility to use my platform to be a voice for people who are too afraid to speak.”