Portland, Maine — In this coastal city where Mohamed Atta began his horrifying Sept. 11 mission, President Bush said Friday that he wants to spend billions more for border security and the Coast Guard.
The president also proposed increasing the Immigration and Naturalization Service's budget by nearly one-third to modernize systems for tracking foreign visitors and making sure "they're not part of some al-Qaida network that wants to hit the United States."
Bush traveled here to salute the men and women of the USCG cutter Tahoma, the command vessel that rushed to New York harbor on Sept. 11. The Tahoma stayed there for 40 days, monitoring water traffic around Ground Zero and protecting the Statue of Liberty and surrounding bridges into lower Manhattan.
Bush sat with the uniformed men and women in the mess hall, telling them the United States is winning the war on terrorists. "But we got a lot to do," he added.
Bush, in more formal remarks at the nearby Southern Maine Technical College, said the Coast Guard is under appreciated by Americans for all its personnel do to stop drug trafficking and secure the nation's 95,000 miles of shoreline.
He said his request to Congress for $282 million in additional funds, bringing the Coast Guard's budget for homeland security missions to nearly $2.9 billion, would be the biggest spending increase ever for the Coast Guard.
Bush also will seek a $1.2 billion increase for the INS and $619 million more for the Customs Service so that more inspectors and double the current number of border patrols can be hired to tighten borders with Canada and Mexico. Bush said he wanted to keep drugs, weapons and terrorists out in a way that "doesn't tie up commerce."
The new money, part of the budget request Bush plans to give to Congress on Feb. 4, would come on top of a $48 billion proposed increase for the Pentagon and other big increases on homeland security all of which are expected to push the federal budget into deficit for the first time since 1997.
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