U.S. Border Patrol Chief Michael Banks resigned Thursday, joining a group of immigration enforcement officials who have left their posts since U.S. President Donald Trump returned to office.
"We thank U.S. Border Patrol Chief Michael Banks for his decades of service to the country," CBP Commissioner Rodney Scott said in a statement.
"During his tenure as head of (border guards), the situation at the border has gone from chaos to the safest border ever," the statement said.
During his presidential campaign, Trump pledged to block border crossings from Mexico to the United States, expel millions of irregular migrants, and under Banks' leadership, the Border Patrol has engaged in anti-immigration operations away from the border, carrying out raids on migrants in major cities across the country.
In March, Trump named Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem and demoted him as a senior commander at Customs and Border Protection, while Acting Director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement Todd Lyons announced he planned to step down in May.
Broad U.S. Escalation in Deportation Policies
Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has begun treating millions of migrants who have been in the United States for years as "entry seekers," denying them the right to bail and automatically placing them in detention, as did Washington's third-country strategy by concluding multimillion-dollar financial agreements with countries such as El Salvador, Rwanda and Equatorial Guinea to forcibly transfer migrants there.
The U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has doubled the value of CBP Home self-deportation incentives from $1,000 to $2,600 for irregular migrants who choose to leave voluntarily.
The escalation has included a reduction in asylum quotas to a record 7,500 refugees a year, as well as new fees for pending asylum applications, in one of the most draconian moves in decades.
Syria on US travel ban list
In 2026, the United States has seen an unprecedented tightening of deportation policies and travel bans, with a direct focus on specific nationalities and demographics, in what rights groups describe as "the largest restructuring of the immigration system in decades."
The circle of targets has expanded significantly, whether through deportation orders, travel restrictions, or visa freezes, making the scene more complex and tense.
Mexican citizens topped the list of nationalities most subject to deportation orders, devouring the countries of the Northern Triangle: Guatemala, El Salvador, and Honduras, at a time when Washington imposed a complete ban on the entry of citizens of 20 countries, including Syria, Yemen, Iran, Somalia, Afghanistan, Libya, Sudan, and South Sudan, in addition to holders of Palestinian Authority passports.
Washington has imposed partial bans on 20 other countries such as Venezuela, Cuba, Nigeria, Mauritania and Senegal, while visa processing for immigration applicants from 75 countries, mostly Muslim-majority countries, Africa and Southeast Asia, has been frozen.
The tightening has extended to broad social and legal groups within the United States, with thousands of pending asylum seekers being deported to "third countries" such as Uganda, Ecuador and Honduras despite having temporary legal status.
As a result of the Trump administration's policies and decisions , mixed-family families have found themselves at risk of breaking up, with more than 5.1 million U.S. children potentially separated from their undocumented parents. The measures also included previously accepted refugees who had undergone a thorough review of their files, while the cap on receiving new refugees was reduced to just 7,500.