On Monday, a day after Immigration and Customs Enforcement said in a statement that it had made 956 arrests as part of President Donald Trump’s crackdown on immigrants in the country illegally, 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 Trump’s “border czar” and numerous political commentators weighing in. One of the commentators called for Gomez, who was born in Texas, to be deported.

Immigration is a subject personal to 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 immigrants from Mexico who entered the U.S. illegally but 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,” Gomez wrote. “But immigration goes beyond politics and headlines. It is a human issue, affecting real people, dismantling real lives.”

In 2017, 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,” Gomez wrote in the Time essay. “It captured the shame, uncertainty and fear I saw my own family struggle with.”

With Trump quickly fulfilling his campaign promise to ramp up arrests and deportations of immigrants in the country illegally, Gomez was again moved to tears, this time on social media.

What was her original post?

Gomez, sitting in a beige-colored room and looking into the camera, said, “All my people are getting attacked, the children.” She was visibly distraught; her face appeared red from crying, and her voice broke as she spoke. Wiping away tears, she added, “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’s video was captioned with the words, “I’m sorry” next to a Mexican flag emoji.

Why did she delete it?

After her post, Gomez was immediately hit with a great deal of negative feedback on all social media platforms, which she acknowledged in her Instagram stories. “Apparently it’s not OK to show empathy for people,” she wrote in a follow-up post that was also deleted.

What were the reactions to her post?

Tom Homan, the acting director of ICE during Trump’s first term and current White House “border czar,” took issue with Gomez’s post. In an interview with Sean Hannity on Fox News, Homan suggested that Gomez’s empathy for deported immigrants was misplaced. “We’ve got a quarter of a million Americans dead from fentanyl coming across an open border. Where’s the tears for them?” Homan said.

Charlie Kirk, founder of conservative political group Turning Point USA, questioned on social platform X why Gomez, an American, would identify with the immigrants rather than her fellow Americans. Political commentator Tomi Lahren said on X, “This is why we don’t take our political advice from Disney child stars.”

Among the most extreme reactions came from Samuel Parker, a Republican who sought to run for the U.S. Senate from Utah in 2018. He wrote a post on X in which he called Gomez’s grandparents “illegals,” despite their having been naturalized as U.S. citizens, and said, “Maybe Selena should be deported, too?”She also received public support from a wide range of prominent people, including Michigan’s governor, Gretchen Whitmer; former talk-show host Geraldo Rivera and rapper Flavor Flav.