Trump wants to rebrand ICE as NICE. Not everyone agrees

By Michael Williams, Priscilla Alvarez, CNN

(CNN) — President Donald Trump has made clear on social media and in interviews that he thinks Immigration and Customs Enforcement needs a rebrand — more specifically, a new name: National Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or NICE.

Whether that change will move forward, in the form of an executive order, or whether it will just be a meme, has been the topic of internal debate at the White House and the Department of Homeland Security.

The idea to change the name of ICE — which would require an act of Congress, not simply an executive order — appears to have originated on social media. In late April, the president shared to his Truth Social account a screenshot of a suggestion made on X that the name be changed “so the media has to say NICE agents all day.”

“GREAT IDEA!!! DO IT,” the president wrote on Truth Social.

Since then, both the White House and the Department of Homeland Security, the Cabinet agency that oversees ICE, have shared memes to their social media accounts endorsing the name change. As the memes took off, officials at ICE remained on standby in case the White House chose to move forward with a name change and crunched numbers on what that would look like, from changing stationary to vests, per a source familiar.

Trump said he’s felt pushback from rank-and-file officers, along with the White House’s border czar, Tom Homan, who were not as enthusiastic.

“But I’m not sure that the guys liked it, because … I think they like their image of being strong, and they’ve done a great job,” he said during a Tuesday interview on WABC’s “Sid and Friends in the Morning.”

A spokesperson for the Department of Homeland Security said in a statement that “the NICE men and women of ICE continue to risk their lives to arrest and remove criminal illegal aliens from American communities.”

A White House official denied that a name change was ever seriously being considered.

“This has always just been a fun meme to troll the libs – and it’s worked!” the official said. “Ultimately, President Trump always wants to do what’s in the best interest of the men and women who keep Americans safe.”

ICE has been perhaps the most heavily and publicly scrutinized federal agency in Trump’s second term, as its agents have deployed nationwide to conduct at-times controversial immigration arrests.

Following the shooting of US citizen Renee Good by an ICE officer in Minneapolis in January, public opinion polling found that slightly more than half of Americans believed the agency was making US cities less safe.

Aware of that criticism, Department of Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin has frequently said he wants to take a “quiet” approach to immigration enforcement while maintaining an aggressive posture.

“We’re staying focused on all illegals, without question,” Mullin, who took over DHS in March, told Newsmax last week. “We’re purposefully trying to be a little more quiet. … That doesn’t mean we’re slowing down even a little bit.”

ICE was created by the Homeland Security Act of 2002, the post-9/11 law enacted by Congress that also created the Department of Homeland Security. Because the agency was created by Congress, changing its name would require congressional action.

But such technicalities have not prevented the administration from acting outside of its authority to change agencies’ names in the past.

In September, the president signed an executive order renaming the Department of Defense to the Department of War — reverting the Cabinet agency’s moniker to one was used from the end of the American Revolution to the end of World War II.

The Congressional Budget Office estimated earlier this year that the Department of Defense rebrand could cost up to $125 million. It’s not clear how much the ICE rebrand could cost; the Department of Defense is a much larger entity than ICE. But if the immigration agency commits to a rebrand, it would require extensive changes to everything from official letterhead and email addresses to building facades, badges and patches, and vehicle decals.

Trump officials and allies have also moved to add the president’s name to the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts and the US Institute of Peace, despite questions about whether they could do so without congressional approval.

The White House has shown a willingness to lash out at those who do not use the president’s preferred nomenclature.

Shortly after Trump was inaugurated for the second time, he signed an executive order directing the Department of the Interior to redesignate the Gulf of Mexico to the Gulf of America. After the Associated Press declined to use the administration’s preferred name in its written copy, the White House sought to ban the AP from covering some events with the president.

The AP sued over those restrictions, and that litigation is ongoing.

This article has been updated with additional developments.

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CNN’s Alejandra Jaramillo and Alayna Treene contributed to this report.