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Thursday, March 24, 2005

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  Speaking at a press conference alongside Mexican President Vicente Fox and Canadian Prime Minister Paul Martin, the president said: "I'm against vigilantes in the United States of America. I'm for enforcing the law in a rational way."

About 1,000 people have joined the Minutemen, an effort that begins next month along the Arizona-Mexico border that includes 30 pilots and their private planes. The group says it will monitor the movement of illegal aliens and report them to the Border Patrol.

The nation's undocumented immigrant population surged to 10.3 million last year, spurred largely since 2000 by the arrivals of unauthorized Mexicans in the United States, a report released Monday said.

President Bush has persistently called for a more liberal border policy, pushing legislation to grant guest-worker status to millions of illegal aliens already in the United States.

Republicans criticized him earlier this month for not adding 2,000 agents to the Border Patrol as prescribed in the intelligence overhaul legislation passed late last year. House Republicans, pointing to intelligence reports that Al Qaida has made efforts to penetrate the nation's porous border, argued that better border control would enhance national security.

The president's budget provided financing for just 210 additional agents for the U.S. borders with Canada and Mexico.

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