The Trump administration has gotten to work on its plans to crack down on illegal immigration, and the reporting on the topic has ranged from inaccurate (i.e. Chicago Public Schools erroneously claiming a visit from U.S. Secret Service agents in regard to a student’s threat against a government official was an Immigration and Customs Enforcement raid) to hysterical.
Speaking of hysterics, Selena Gomez took to Instagram on Monday to post – and swiftly delete – a video in which she sobbed over the possibility of deportations. If her subsequent post was any indication, the actress’ more than 420 million followers apparently didn’t appreciate the emotional diatribe.
On Monday’s show, Megyn was joined by Batya Ungar-Sargon, author of Second Class, to discuss Gomez’s outburst and the effects of “mass misinformation” in society today.
The Video
Gomez is the third-most followed person on Instagram and she broke down in tears in an Instagram Story post on the platform while speaking about the threat of mass deportations.
“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 stammered in the since-deleted recording.
The Mexican-American pop star captioned the post, “I’m sorry” with a Mexican flag emoji. But it wasn’t up for long. After quickly deleting her post, she shared another Instagram story (below) that read, “Apparently it’s not ok to show empathy for people.”
The Only Murders in the Building star’s posts came on the heels of an announcement from ICE on Sunday that a “nationwide immigration crackdown resulted in the arrest of 956 people” since Trump returned to office.
While Gomez was born and raised in Texas, she admitted in an October 2019 essay in Time Magazine that her aunt entered the United States from Mexico hidden in the back of a truck in the 1970s. She produced a documentary for Netflix that same year titled Living Undocumented that chronicled the lives of undocumented families in the U.S.
“Undocumented immigration is an issue I think about every day, and I never forget how blessed I am to have been born in this country thanks to my family and the grace of circumstance,” she wrote in Time. “But when I read the news headlines or see debates about immigration rage on social media, I feel afraid for those in similar situations. I feel afraid for my country.”
‘Mass Misinformation’
While Megyn said Gomez “has a lot of power” because she is “very popular with a large segment of the population,” there seems to be a vocal faction of her audience that was not interested in her purported “empathy.”
“She decides to go on Instagram and cry tears about all the illegal children, I guess, who might be subject to deportation,” Megyn noted. “But she deleted it after her fans taught her that the majority of the country stands behind these policies. I’m sure she was shocked to get any blowback whatsoever.”
Ungar-Sargon questioned just who Gomez thought she was standing up for. “Who is she weeping for? The rapists and murderers who are being deported because that is all they have come for so far,” she explained. “Why are ‘her people’ not the victims of the murderers and the rapists – be they migrant victims of murderers and rapists or American victims of murderers and rapists? What is wrong with this person that she can look at the scum of the earth that Donald Trump is getting out of this country and repatriating where they came from and say, ‘Everything is going poorly for my people’?”
She blamed the antics on the “woke mindset” that sees identity politics over anything else. “You look at the color of the skin rather than the actions, rather than ‘is this person good or evil?’ They are evil, and she is weeping for them. It is so sad,” Ungar-Sargon continued. “This woman is the victim of… mass misinformation and a mental health crisis that is really, really, really deeply, deeply embedded.”
Megyn agreed. “Obviously, this is an unwell person,” she said. “Anybody who takes their phone [and films like that] is a sick person. Tears happen… but I don’t understand the person who works it and tries to squeeze out more tears to make themselves look extra sad.”
You can check out Megyn’s full interview with Ungar-Sargon by tuning in to episode 992 on YouTube, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you like to listen. And don’t forget that you can catch The Megyn Kelly Show live on SiriusXM’s Triumph (channel 111) weekdays from 12pm to 2pm ET.