The national chief of the Border Patrol, Michael Banks, was known among colleagues for taking regular trips abroad to engage in sex with prostitutes, according to six current and former Border Patrol employees who spoke with the Washington Examiner. Banks “bragged” to colleagues while in his previous management role at Border Patrol about paying for sex with prostitutes while traveling in Colombia and Thailand over the course of a decade. Banks’ behavior was said to have been investigated by Customs and Border Protection officials twice, including last year, but the investigation ended abruptly while Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem was in office, leading to more questions. (…) The first source, a retired Border Patrol agent in management, shared in a phone call in late March that he had known Banks personally in the early to mid 2010s when Banks was a field operations supervisor in Nogales, Arizona. The agent had met with Banks and another agent at restaurants on several occasions, in which Banks had invited him to go with him and another agent on a trip abroad. “Initially, he said, ‘We like to go scuba diving.’ But then he’s like, ‘We get a bunch of prostitutes and have a good time,’” the retired agent recalled. “And I told him, ‘No, thanks.’ And I kind of just stopped associating with him on any personal level after that.” The trips were on Banks’ personal time, according to the same person. Other current and former Border Patrol employees in Arizona and Texas confirmed that they had heard about Banks touting his trips and what he did on them, either first-person or secondhand. The trips continued after Banks moved to the Rio Grande Valley of Texas in the late 2010s and possibly up until his retirement in 2023. Banks returned to the DHS in January 2025. The first source, the closest person to Banks, said he chose to speak out now because it bothered him that the head of the organization had so openly talked about his endeavors. “He’s going to know it’s me,” the same person said. “F*** him, because he knows the truth.”
via washington examiner; Border Patrol chief Michael Banks hit with prostitution allegations by agents