"Thank God Trump Won": New Border Patrol Chief Signals Enforcement Is Back

By A Former Border Patrol Agent

I wanted to talk first about the replacement of Border Patrol Chief Jason Owens, but there is so much going on right now on the immigration front. The illegal CBP One App has finally been shut down and would be invaders are crying about it.

The left will be trying to use their tears to help get them on to the Magic Dirt of the United States. It’s already happening. Birthright citizenship may be ending. Trump has signed an executive order on this, but it will be fought over in court. I defer to Ann Coulter’s article(s) on birthright citizenship because she knows much more about it than I.

In Border Patrol news, an Agent was reportedly shot and killed by a visa overstayer near Newport, Vermont which is only a few miles from the Canadian border. The speculation is that with Trump being inaugurated, a lot of illegal aliens may try to flee to Canada. There was at least one other passenger in the suspect vehicle, possibly two. This is not so unusual—more about the suspects here.

When Trump was first elected the last time around, there was also a surge of illegal aliens going into Canada. As I recall, there were a lot of Haitians trying to get into Quebec because they speak French there and the Haitians feared being deported to the country of their making. (In 2025, the Premier of Quebec has said that he’s planning to be “very, very careful” with the border because it does not want to “end up with a new Roxham”—a part of Upstate New York that borders Quebec and saw a lot of crossings into Canada.) It is quite possible that an illegal alien who already had a criminal history feared being deported to the land of his birth and was hoping to make a clean break in the Great White North.

But I digress. The news that had me actually give a shout for joy was the news that Chief Jason Owens was stepping down as BP’s leader and being replaced by former Border Patrol Agent Mike Banks. Banks was serving as Texas’s Border Czar for Governor Abbott.

Now, the outgoing Jason Owens may have been a really nice guy, I don’t know. I’ve written about him before and I said that if Trump were to be elected he should be replaced even if he was squared away in his own right. The fact of the matter was that Owens took the helm when the Border Patrol was at the height of its welcoming committee assignment. When the Border Patrol was suffering from “Mission Compromise” (no longer doing the mission it was set up to do), he decided to take over command. Some have speculated that Owens took the job precisely because he was hoping that Trump would be elected and then he would be allowed to make arrests. After all, Owens was a member of BORTAC, the Border Patrol’s version of SWAT. (Like the Border Patrol Agents who took out the Uvalde school shooter).

You would think someone like that would truly believe in the mission of the Border Patrol. However, in my experience, this was not always the case. Some of the guys who gravitated towards the Special Response Teams (SRT), BORSTAR (our paramedics), and BORTAC just loved training. They loved going to the firing range, rolling around on mats with other guys while practicing handcuffing techniques and doing raids…not necessarily immigration raids either.

They wanted to play soldier, not do the boring work of staring at a trail for hours waiting for a group of aliens to come up a trail, only to find the aliens took a different route.

The BORTACers (pronounced like Bortackers) were encouraged to promote up the chain of command so that their pet projects would never get defunded. They would sometimes go on details down to Colombia to help out some DEA mission down there.

Representative Dan Crenshaw from Texas was a Navy SEAL, but that doesn’t mean he was particularly focused on protecting the citizens of his state. He has a C rating from NumbersUSA and got the nickname “Eye Patch McCain” for a reason. Likewise, I’m glad to see Owens step down, although, he won’t be leaving till April.

His replacement is Mike Banks. Banks was in the Navy MPs and then joined the Border Patrol transferring several times before retiring out as the Patrol Agent in Charge (acronym PAIC, but pronounced “pack”) of the Weslaco, Texas Border Patrol Station. He served as Governor Abbott’s Border Czar. It’s hard to tell how he will be, but he seems to actually believe in the job. Here’s an interview of him from over a year ago:

Owens had to go if for no other reason that it sends a message to the line agents that going along with open borders policies is unacceptable. I hope that Banks is able to turn the Border Patrol around and get them back to being “Mean Green” and arresting people.

Thank God Trump won!

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