Donald Trump’s Department of Homeland Security used footage of an ICE agent stealing a rose from a slain mother’s memorial in a propaganda video boasting “ICE is NICE.”
The bizarre rebrand kicked off late Sunday night when Trump, 79, endorsed a viral right-wing demand to rename Immigration and Customs Enforcement as “National Immigration and Customs Enforcement”—handing the agency the new initials NICE. Within hours, DHS had stitched together a saccharine montage of agents grinning and aiding the public, captioned “ICE is NICE.”
But as our sister investigations Substack PunchUp first reported Wednesday, eagle-eyed viewers spotted something darker tucked inside it.
Among the beaming agents was one filmed outside ICE’s Whipple Federal Building command post in Minneapolis on Jan. 8—the exact spot where, a day earlier, a makeshift memorial had sprung up for Renee Nicole Good, the unarmed 37-year-old mother of three shot dead by ICE agent Jonathan Ross, 43.
The footage shows a heavily armed, masked agent twirling a single red rose between his fingers before passing it to a female colleague and doing a jig in what appeared to be a mocking display for nearby protesters. The woman then places it inside her top.
“The flower in this shot was taken from a makeshift memorial to Renee Good and the incident caused outrage at the time,” American Immigration Council fellow Aaron Reichlin-Melnick wrote on X. “The choice to include that shot in this video was deliberate trolling by our government.”
The original moment was uncovered by The Atlantic’s Robert F. Worth, who described how documentary filmmaker Chad Knutson watched it unfold on a livestream from his home in St. Paul before driving straight to the Whipple Building in tears. “I barely park my car and I’m running out screaming and crying, ‘You stole a f--king flower from a dead woman. Like, are any of you human anymore?’” Knutson recalled.
Good, a poet whose 6-year-old son was orphaned by her killing, was shot three times—in the arm, breast, and head—as she tried to drive her Honda Pilot away from an ICE operation on a residential south Minneapolis street. On his own cellphone footage, Ross can be heard muttering “f--king bitch” as Good’s car crashed into a parked vehicle. Members of the Trump administration justified the killing by branding her a “domestic terrorist.”
PunchUp revealed Sunday that Ross has since been quietly relocated to another state and allowed to resume work, with the FBI investigation into Good’s killing effectively frozen.
The “NICE” stunt was pushed online by a MAGA influencer who told her followers she wanted the rebrand “so the media has to say NICE agents all day everyday.” Trump replied on Truth Social: “GREAT IDEA!!! DO IT.”
The move comes under new DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin, 48, the former MMA fighter and Oklahoma senator confirmed last month after Trump fired Kristi Noem, 54, on March 5. That was driven partly, Trump aides said, over “the fallout in Minnesota.” Mullin told CNN the agent who shot Good “didn’t have an option” but to “engage” the unarmed mother, claiming her vehicle should be viewed as a “deadly weapon.”
It is not the first time DHS officers have been caught defiling Good’s memory. In January, a Federal Protective Service officer was filmed kicking over a candle at a Sacramento vigil for Good and snarling, “I don’t give a f--k” at a horrified protester.
In response to a request for comment, a DHS spokesperson responded by sending a link to the “ICE is NICE” video. When asked by the Daily Beast whether they had included the clip with full awareness of its source, they did not respond.
