The Selena Gomez controversy may not be your idea of a top story right now, but I think it has a certain interest to it. As you may know, Gomez took to social media to post a video of herself sobbing about the recent ICE deportations. No sooner did she do so, but she was assailed for it. She tried to explain herself, only to invite further derision, then ended up deleting both the original post and one of her later explanations. 

Of particular interest to me is this riposte to Gomez from Thomas Homan, acting director of ICE during Trump’s first term, and now the White House “border czar.” 

We’ve got a quarter of a million Americans dead from fentanyl coming across an open border. Where’s the tears for them?

The border isn’t “open,” and the “quarter of a million” figure is phony. But I have a pretty direct answer to Homan’s question, and have special standing to answer it: If you want tears, look elsewhere. 

My wife Alison committed suicide by overdosing on opioids–not fentanyl, but hydromorphone, not that it matters. She planned for it, and talked about it, for years. So I know all about living with someone dependent on opioids, and know all about the tears you cry when you lose a loved one to suicide by overdose. But no migrant forced my wife to take opioids or commit suicide, and no migrant forced a “quarter of a million Americans” to do so, either. Americans need to have the honesty and self-respect to admit that opioid overdoses are something they did to themselves. 

Alison had many faults, but I knew her well enough to know that she would never have blamed her opioid dependency, personal problems, or suicide on migrants, much less have sought to deport people in posthumous revenge for those things. She was a psychotherapist, and many of her clients were Spanish-speaking migrants. Whether they were documented or not, I have no idea. But it doesn’t matter to me, and it didn’t matter to her. It only matters to lying sociopaths like Thomas Homan and the people who put him in power.  

I could belabor the fact that the problem of chronic pain is a bigger one that that of fentanyl addiction. Fentanyl is an FDA-approved painkiller, and its availability off the books means that some chronic pain patients are in less pain than they might otherwise be. Thank your nearest migrant drug dealer for that. 

But in a way, that’s beside the point. Homan was asking where my tears were. If he’s asking where my tears are for people who want to blame their drug problems on migrants, I don’t have any. Why would I? As far as I’m concerned, such people are better off dead. 

Whatever our issues, neither Alison nor I spent our time looking for people to deport. If that’s your way of coping with your drug dependency issues, or of mourning your dead, there’s a lot more wrong with you than the availability of fentanyl can explain. Weaponizing your grief and exploiting the memory of the dead isn’t going to help you. The first step is to admit that you have a problem–you.  The second step is to grasp is that you can’t expect tears from us after making a you-problem ours.