WASHINGTON – Shortly after Wednesday’s fatal shooting of a Minneapolis woman by an ICE agent, Sen. Tina Smith (D-Minn.) was getting details from people directly on the scene.

A longtime community organizer, Smith has strong ties to activists in her state, some of whom headed to the site of the shooting and were sharing people’s eyewitness accounts of what happened. But when Smith finally saw a video of the shooting that was posted to social media, it was still a shock.

“I literally gasped in pain and horror,” Smith said in a Thursday interview. She watched it multiple times. “When you’re in my job, you have to try to really, fully understand what is happening, at the same time that you’re having, you know, a very human reaction to this awful tragedy,” she said.

She was still watching the video clip when Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem appeared on her office TV. Wildly contrary to the eyewitness accounts Smith was getting, and the video she’d been reviewing, Noem claimed the woman who had just been shot to death, later identified as 37-year-old Renee Nicole Good, had committed “an act of domestic terrorism” by trying to run over an ICE agent with her car.

“Really stunning to watch that,” fumed the Minnesota Democrat. “Kristi Noem, with her big cowboy hat on, telling us all exactly what had happened – and it was so clearly at odds with the one eyewitness video that I’d seen at that point. I was just disgusted to see them immediately try to spin this and gaslight people about what had happened.”

Smith said she was conscious of the fact that a video can only show one viewpoint, but Noem’s claim defied the evidence. Multiple videos with different angles of the situation show Good, a mother of three, apparently trying to drive away, not doing anything threatening or violent toward ICE agents on the street. One person on the scene told HuffPost that Good seemed “obviously scared” and was trying to leave.

President Donald Trump has since doubled down on Noem’s version of events, piling on inflammatory rhetoric and falsely claiming on social media that Good “violently, willfully and viciously ran over the ICE Officer, who seems to have shot her in self defense.” Vice President JD Vance straight-up blamed Good for being shot to death during a briefing on Thursday, baselessly claiming she belonged to a “broader left-wing network.”

After Minnesota officials challenged the federal government’s version of events, the state was shut out of the investigation into the shooting.

On Thursday, Minnesota state investigators said the FBI was denying them access to evidence necessary for carrying out a probe into the shooting. The FBI routinely works with the state’s Bureau of Criminal Apprehension on investigations, but not this time. The BCA, which is not a political entity, issued a statement clarifying that it was being blocked by the feds.

“So angry,” Smith said when asked about the Trump administration’s response.

“The federal government should not be seen by my community as an enemy, and that is how it feels to a lot of people right now who are in the midst of this,” said the senator. “That the federal government can’t be trusted, that they are killing people on the street.”

She said her office immediately called the FBI when she learned they were denying BCA a role in the investigation, telling them what they’re doing is unacceptable. Minnesotans will have no reason to believe the FBI’s probe will be fair or unbiased, she warned, given the way top Trump administration officials have already been trying to blame Good for the shooting.

The FBI’s response? They told her office they’re unable to talk about the matter because it’s an active investigation. Pure nonsense, said Smith.

“We pushed back hard on that because they’ve already talked – not only talked about the investigation, but they’ve talked about what they have concluded happened without any investigation,” said the senator. “So they have no standing to say, ’Oh, we can’t talk about this,” when they’ve already talked about it.”

For now, the Minnesota senator says she’s focused on doing whatever she can to ensure there’s a credible investigation into what happened to Good. She also wants ICE out of her state.

“There’s no question in my mind that the ICE agents in Minnesota are contributing to public unsafety, and I think that they should leave,” she said.

Instead, the administration is reportedly planning to surge officers from Customs and Border Protection to Minnesota.

The whole situation is “horrifying,” Smith added, and feels like Trump is waging “some sort of bizarre political attack on my state and our constituents.”

“Where is the humanity here?” she asked. “How far are they really gonna go?”