Minnesota Senator ‘Disgusted’ By Kristi Noem Trying To ‘Gaslight’ People About ICE Shooting

In an interview, Tina Smith also ripped top Trump officials for trying to turn a Minneapolis woman’s killing into a political fight: “Where is the humanity here?”

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.”