“I want you to imagine waking up one morning, and your father is just gone,” Awa Sow says at the beginning of Living Undocumented, Netflix’s six-part series executive produced by Selena Gomez. The show follows eight undocumented families from across America as they navigate the US immigration system under the Trump administration. One family is the Sows, from Mauritania and now living in Ohio, whose father Amadou was arrested and was being held indefinitely in detention. Director Aaron Saidman told The Guardian that the series was intended as “a more comprehensive story of immigration, but directly from the immigrants themselves.” Along with harrowing footage and emotional interviews with the families, the series also features interviews with attorneys, advocates, and journalists to explain how the US immigration system functions and how “complicated and daunting and intimidating that system is for the immigrants who are going through it.”

“This was specifically designed to not be a political story,” Saidman said. “This is meant to be a human interest story where you can get a sense of what these people are really going through.” He added: “Hopefully this series will help accomplish this, that they understand that these people aren’t just statistics.” Selena Gomez, the show’s executive producer, wants viewers to look beyond the headlines. “I watched footage outlining their deeply personal journeys and I cried,” she wrote in Time Magazine of the series. “It captured the shame, uncertainty, and fear I saw my own family struggle with. But it also captured the hope, optimism, and patriotism so many undocumented immigrants still hold in their hearts despite the hell they go through.”