Mike Banks, the border patrol chief who oversaw the most aggressive militarization of the US southern border in recent history, has resigned with immediate effect.

“It’s just time,” Banks told Fox News in an interview. “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) did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Banks’ abrupt exit.

The resignation comes weeks after the Washington Examiner reported that six current and former border patrol employees had accused Banks of regularly paying for sex with prostitutes during trips to Colombia and Thailand over more than a decade, and bragging about it to colleagues.

The behavior was said to have been investigated twice by CBP officials, with one inquiry reportedly ending abruptly while former homeland security secretary, Kristi Noem, was in office.

CBP described the matter as “closed” last month, with a spokesperson telling the Examiner the allegations “date back more than a decade and were reviewed years ago”.

The agency did not immediately respond to the Guardian on Thursday when asked for comment on the allegations.

Banks took over as border patrol chief in early 2025 and swiftly became central to the Trump administration’s controversial drive to reshape US immigration enforcement. He oversaw a dramatic expansion of prosecutions for unlawful border crossings, intensified coordination between border patrol and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), and the rollout of broader interior enforcement operations across the country.

Among that agenda was Banks’s role in launching so-called national defense areas along the southern border. Last April, under his watch, the administration designated large stretches of federal land as military zones and transferred jurisdiction to the US army. By mid-2025, the zones covered nearly a third of the entire US-Mexico border, and were patrolled by at least 7,600 troops.

In an interview with Newsmax last November, Banks said border patrol agents would “go anywhere in the United States” to apprehend undocumented immigrants, and said that border patrol was helping ICE in 25 cities, while “adding more cities every day”.