The chief of US Customs and Border Patrol (CBP) has announced that he is resigning, telling Fox News that his departure is effective immediately.
Michael Banks had been in the role since US President Donald Trump’s return to the White House last year.
His departure is the latest shakeup for the Trump administration’s immigration policy team, after the president fired his secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem earlier this year, and outspoken CBP commander Greg Bovino quit before that.
“It’s just time,” Banks told Fox News on Thursday. “I feel like I got the ship back on course from the least secure disastrous chaotic border to the most secure border this country has ever seen,” he said.
In a letter to staff on Thursday, Banks wrote: “It is time for me to retire and return home to Texas to focus on my family and ranch.”
“What we have accomplished together in the last year and a half is nothing short of amazing,” Banks wrote in the note seen by CBS News, the BBC’s US partner.
CBP Commissioner Rodney Scott, who oversaw Banks in his chief role, issued a statement thanking him “for his decades of service to this country”.
His statement also noted that Banks came out of retirement to work for Trump, and congratulated him “on his second retirement after returning to serve during one of the most challenging periods for border security”.
Though the job had previously been held mostly by officials who had worked for many years at the highest levels of the CBP, Banks had worked as a border adviser for Texas Governor Greg Abbott. Before that, he held mid-level roles in CBP.
Under the administration of President Joe Biden, Banks quit CBP out of frustration with the department’s morale and disagreements with the Democratic president’s approach to border security.
He has also served in the US Navy, as he noted in his resignation letter, and worked in other law enforcement roles.
It was not immediately clear who would replace him as chief of CBP.
During Trump’s second term, CBP has taken part in immigration enforcement operations in US cities, including Los Angeles, Chicago and Minneapolis.
Those operations, and Border Patrol’s participation in them, have come under intense scrutiny from Trump administration critics, especially after the killings of two American citizens by federal immigration officials in Minneapolis in January.
By BBC News
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