Last summer, Donald Trump and his team launched a rebranding effort of sorts, telling everyone to start calling the Department of Defense the Department of War. At a White House event, a reporter reminded the president that it would require an act of Congress to rename a federal agency, but he replied, “We’re just going to do it.”
To the extent that Trump’s rhetoric reflects the administration’s actual plans, it appears he might just do it again, with a different agency. USA Today reported:
President Donald Trump endorsed changing the name of Immigration and Customs Enforcement to National Immigration and Customs Enforcement in a Truth Social post on Sunday, April 26.
The name change would convert the agency’s acronym from ICE to NICE.
A conservative influencer apparently floated the idea more than a month ago, but on Sunday night, the president threw his support behind the proposed change. “GREAT IDEA!!! DO IT,” he wrote to his social media platform.
Whether this was just a passing presidential whim or an actual directive that will lead to official action remains unclear. Either way, however, the message reflected the ongoing White House assumption that ICE has a public relations problem, rather than a substantive one.
After polling showed that a majority of Americans disapproved of the way ICE was enforcing immigration laws, the president argued that the Department of Homeland Security and ICE needed to “start talking” about their work, at which point the American public will learn what agents have been up to and be duly impressed.
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The reality, however, was that the American public already seemed well aware of what ICE agents were up to. That was the problem. To conclude that the agency was struggling with a public relations crisis was to overlook the inconvenient fact that DHS and ICE have been guided by the wrong policies, not the wrong talking points.
That’s a challenge that a “NICE” name change won’t address.
As for the bigger picture, ICE remains part of the Department of Homeland Security, which was technically shut down in mid-February. Last week, Senate Republicans approved a measure to fund ICE and Border Patrol for the remainder of Trump’s second term, but the measure is still pending in the Republican-led House, as is a related measure that would fund all of DHS except for ICE and Border Patrol. Watch this space.
This post updates our related earlier coverage.
Steve Benen is a producer for "The Rachel Maddow Show," the editor of MaddowBlog and an MS NOW political contributor. He's also the bestselling author of "Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans' War on the Recent Past."
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