Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) represents communities that President Donald Trump has been targeting for years — and his attacks have frequently turned personal. With the effects of such attacks now putting her home state in the national spotlight, Omar feels a sense of responsibility.

“I am much more than a representative to these communities, I am one of them, and so we are all collectively hanging on to one another and standing by each other,” Omar told HuffPost on Friday, saying she was preparing to travel back to Minneapolis, which her district covers. “It’s been really important for us to understand that this moment is not about attacking one community of an ethnic background but this attack is essentially on Americans.”

Minneapolis has been reeling this week after an Immigrations and Customs Enforcement officer fatally shot 37-year-old Renee Good. The Trump administration alleges Good tried to run over law enforcement agents, despite video evidence that contradicts their claims. The shooting has a direct link to another set of questionable arguments from Trump and his political allies: The administration escalated its immigration enforcement operations in the state in late December after right-wing influencer Nick Shirley promoted allegations that Somalis in Minnesota committed $100 million worth of fraud — with conservatives arguing Democrats ignored the issue to avoid losing the community’s votes.

Trump has said Omar and other Somalis in Minnesota — the vast majority of whom are U.S. citizens — should be deported en masse.

“Renee Nicole Good’s murder was not an accident and not an isolated tragedy,” Omar wrote to HuffPost after the interview. “It was the predictable result of deliberate choices by Donald Trump and his administration. For weeks, the president has fueled fear and bigoted lies, especially targeting Minnesota’s Somali community while unleashing ICE to operate with near-total impunity. That reckless escalation created the conditions that led directly to Renee’s death.”

Federal officials are denying that Minnesota’s law enforcement authorities should play a role in the probe over the incident, raising alarm in Washington about the credibility of the investigation.

Omar on Friday led more than 150 House Democrats in a letter to Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem and acting ICE Director Todd Lyons, demanding that the administration preserve evidence, send Congress body-camera footage from the officer and other federal personnel around the incident, and describe plans to cooperate with federal watchdogs and local investigators.

“You have lost the faith and confidence of the American people,” reads the letter, which was exclusively provided to HuffPost and also demands the end of the mounting surge of federal officers to Minneapolis. The message is the biggest statement yet about the investigation from Democratic lawmakers.

Omar wants to use her federal perch “to make sure that this investigation doesn’t die in darkness,” she said, noting that Minnesota officials have opened their own inquiry.

“Transparency and accountability is really important to a community that has experienced so much heartache and evil,” she said.

Omar called the right-wing narrative about Good’s killing evidence of the Trump administration’s effort to govern through “delusion.”

“This level of terror and remove from reality is not something the American people are going to allow to exist,” she said.

Omar acknowledged the massive fraud over social services in her state, which involved hundreds of thousands of dollars, represented some of the most striking pandemic-era theft and for which investigators have mostly charged people of Somali descent. But she cast Republicans’ highlighting of the issue as hypocritical given Democrats’ involvement in probing the allegations and self-serving to support Trump’s agenda.

“It was Democrats under the Biden administration, with the support of the state that’s led by [Gov.] Tim Walz and [attorney general] Keith Ellison who did make sure these people were investigated … and now are facing long prison sentences for the crimes they committed, not only against Minnesota taxpayers but the nation’s taxpayers,” Omar said, accusing the first Trump administration of failing to design safeguards in rolling out benefits programs when the COVID-19 pandemic began. Walz has dropped his bid for a third term as governor amid the mounting scandal.

“Republicans both in Minnesota and nationally are just now apparently tuning in,” she continued.

Fifty-seven people have been convicted so far as part of investigations, which have been going on for years. But Republican state lawmakers and some in the Somali community have claimed Minnesota officials overlooked evidence of misconduct because of fear of denting Somali support for the Democratic Party. Minnesota GOP figures provided material featured in Shirley’s video.

Omar argued everyone should be concerned by the attacks.

“I feel very angry when I see these people turn this into a partisan issue, when we should collectively care about the damage that has been done by these criminals to these systems, to the trust the taxpayers have in lawmakers,” the congresswoman said.

But she also expressed little hope that Republicans will become more honest about challenging Trump’s narratives, even amid outrage over the death of Good, a mother of three who appeared to pose no threat to ICE agents.

“They behave in a cultlike way,” Omar said. “They have contempt for the American people and they have contempt for the Constitution [while] they say they are about freedom and liberty.”

Read the letter from Omar and her colleagues below: