Mike Banks, the US Border Patrol chief who oversaw a major escalation of immigration enforcement under President Donald Trump, has resigned with immediate effect. His departure comes weeks after reports emerged that he had been accused by six current and former border patrol employees of regularly paying for sex with prostitutes during trips to Colombia and Thailand over more than a decade.
Banks told Fox News: “It’s just time. I feel like I got the ship back on course from the least secure, most disastrous, most chaotic border to the most secure border this country has ever seen.” Customs and Border Protection (CBP) Commissioner Rodney Scott thanked Banks for his decades of service and said the border had been transformed “from chaos to the most secure border ever recorded”.
The Washington Examiner reported that the allegations against Banks had been investigated twice by CBP officials, with one inquiry ending abruptly while former Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem was in office. CBP described the matter as “closed” last month, stating that the allegations “date back more than a decade and were reviewed years ago”. The agency declined to comment further when contacted by the Guardian.
Banks took over as Border Patrol chief in early 2025 and became central to the Trump administration’s controversial immigration crackdown. He oversaw a dramatic expansion of prosecutions for unlawful border crossings, intensified coordination with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), and the rollout of broader interior enforcement operations. Under his watch, the administration designated large stretches of federal land along the southern border as “national defence areas”, transferring jurisdiction to the US army. By mid-2025, these zones covered nearly a third of the entire US-Mexico border and were patrolled by at least 7,600 troops.
Banks is the latest senior figure in Trump’s immigration crackdown to leave the administration. Noem was fired in March, and Gregory Bovino, the public face of the crackdown in Minneapolis, was demoted earlier this year before retiring. In a November interview with Newsmax, Banks said Border Patrol agents would “go anywhere in the United States” to apprehend undocumented immigrants, and that the agency was helping ICE in 25 cities, “adding more cities every day”.
