"People from many different countries are fighting, not just from Mexico," he said. "We want to participate in this country."

It is unclear how many soldiers find their loyalties similarly divided, but at a time when Pentagon has stepped up recruiting of Hispanics to fill recruiting quotas, experts say a crackdown on illegal immigration would undoubtedly cause resentment in the ranks.

"How do you tell them we're going to deport their parents and grandparents?" asked Hector Flores, president of the League of United Latin American Citizens, a group that has encouraged Hispanics who do not plan to attend college to join the military. "That's not America."

Hispanics are increasingly joining the military as their numbers have grown, according to a 2004 study on Marine recruitment by CNA Corp., a research firm in Arlington, Va. The study found Hispanics have done exceptionally well in the Marines, with boot-camp attrition rates well below average.

Hispanics accounted for 16.5 percent of Marine recruits last year, up from 13.4 percent in 2002 and 11.7 percent in 1997, the firm said.

Soldiers and veterans have been a popular presence at a wave of pro-immigrant rallies across the country in recent weeks. In Houston, speakers at a rally this month repeatedly pointed to people in uniform on a nearby bridge, and they received roaring applause, said Eliseo Medina, a top official of the Service Employees International Union.

"They stick out like a sore thumb," Medina said. "When (demonstrators) see people in uniform, it gives them tremendous pride and validates that we are contributing to this country."

At a pro-immigration rally April 9 that drew 50,000 people in San Diego, Hispanic veterans from World War II carried signs that read "We Fought in Your Wars," said Jorge Mariscal, a Vietnam veteran.

"After serving our country, to see our relatives now criminalized through this legislation is provoking a lot of people," said Mariscal, director of Chicano studies at the University of California, San Diego.

Rodriguez enlisted in 2004 after graduating from high school in Painesville, Ohio. Nine months later, he was combing Iraq for insurgents near the Syrian border. He barely escaped death when three friends of his were killed by a roadside bomb last June.

Rodriguez is now a freshman at Baldwin-Wallace College in Berea, Ohio, where he is studying international relations. He said he has dreamed since boyhood of joining the
CIA. He speaks English and Spanish and is learning French.

His father, Ernesto Rodriguez, crossed illegally into the United States in 1976 after deciding that he would never be able to support a family in Mexico. He had dropped out of school after third grade and had been farming corn in the Mexican state of Guanajuato from age 16. After getting caught by the Border Patrol, he made it on a second try and worked on a chicken farm near Dallas.

The elder Rodriguez, now 47, became a permanent resident under a 1986 law that gave legal status to 2.6 million immigrants. He moved to Ohio to find work and in 1998 got permission to bring his wife and three children this country. Marcial was 13 at the time.

Marcial's cousin Eli Rodriguez illegally crossed the border in 1999 and moved in with Marcial's father. Eli Rodriguez paid a smuggler $1,200 to bring him across the Arizona desert.

"He's like a brother," Marcial Rodriguez said. "He's just working for a better life, nothing more. Mexico has nothing to offer him."

Eli, 24, married a Mexican woman he met in Ohio, rented an apartment and makes $10 an hour as a landscaper. He said he hopes to obtain legal status and join the military.

"I want to join the military, but I can't. This country has given me a lot," he said. "I would like to serve."

"Anybody who is a fugitive from justice is a danger to the community," said Michael Rozos, the field director in Miami of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement's "Operation Phoenix" effort to find and deport fugitive illegal immigrants.

"These operations have been going on for years, but they have become more focused," he said.

Of the 183 arrested, 130 were fugitives who had already been ordered deported by an immigration judge. The remaining 53 were also illegal immigrants who happened to be present when fugitives were taken into custody, Rozos said.

The fugitive operation is separate from another ICE-led crackdown on employers who hire and harbor illegal immigrants. Rozos said both are part of the Secure Border Initiative, a Homeland Security Department plan intended to beef up enforcement of existing immigration laws inside the U.S. and toughen border security.

Ninety-five of those arrested were in South Florida, 35 were arrested in Tampa, 30 in Jacksonville and 23 in Orlando, according to ICE.

With Congress coming back from a two-week spring recess to a long election-year to-do list and tensions flaring nationwide over immigration, Bush urged lawmakers to adopt a middle-ground policy. He called a Senate bill, which creates a way for illegal immigrants to work legally in the United States and for many to eventually become citizens, an "important approach."

"It's just an interesting concept that people need to think through," Bush said of the bill sponsored by Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., which stalled before the congressional break.

As for Bush's comment on deportation, a Time magazine poll in January found 50 percent of the country favored deporting all illegal immigrants. But even Rep. Tom Tancredo, R-Colo., one of Congress' most outspoken advocates for tougher immigration laws, does not advocate mass deportation.

Well aware that November elections could end GOP control of Congress, Bush is walking a fine line on the emotional immigration issue, between his party's conservative base which wants a clampdown on illegal immigration and business leaders who believe the economy needs immigrants to fill jobs.

All sides are exerting pressure.

With armed citizen patrols popping up in border states, leaders in Arizona and New Mexico have pleaded for better policing of U.S. borders while other communities complain about the pressure that burgeoning immigrant populations are placing on local services. At the same time, tens of thousands of Hispanic and others - a potentially important voting bloc - have taken to streets across the country in the past few weeks to demand more immigration-friendly policies.

Reflecting that debate, when Bush turned to the audience assembled by the Orange County Business Council for questions, three of the eight queries he took were on immigration, including one from a woman who asked for his solution to emergency rooms crowded with poor people seeking routine care. Southern California's Orange County is a heavily Republican swath of sprawling Los Angeles suburbs that has been known - even parodied - as white, rich and conservative. But minorities now make up a majority of residents.

Bush said community health centers are the best place for the poor to get primary care. "There needs to be a campaign to explain what's available for people so that they don't go to the emergency rooms," he said.

He sought to highlight the contributions of immigrants to American society, and lamented the harsh - and sometimes deadly - conditions that many people face trying to illegally enter the country.

"One thing we cannot lose sight of is that we're talking about human beings, decent human beings that need to be treated with respect," the president said.

The House has passed a law-and-order immigration bill that would erect fences along the Mexican border and treat people who sneak across as felons to be deported. An alternative Senate measure would set up a temporary guest worker program, like the McCain bill, but require all illegal immigrants to leave the United States before they could apply for the visas.

As he has before, Bush stopped short of directly endorsing the McCain bill. The White House will go no further than to call it an attractive vehicle to keep negotiations moving.

The bill, also sponsored by Sen. Edward Kennedy, D-Mass., would boost border security but also create three-year visas for guest workers. Those who have been in the country longer than five years would not have to return home to apply for the visas. It would also allow for the workers to apply for legal permanent residency after paying a $2,000 fine, learning to speak English and working six years.

In an apparent, though indirect reference to Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid, Bush said the McCain measure had been derailed by "needless politics." Republicans have been blaming Reid, D-Nev., for blocking the bill because he failed to reach agreement with Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, R-Tenn. on a procedure for voting on amendments sought by GOP opponents of the legislation.

"President Bush likes to point his finger on immigration and many other issues. Isn't it about time we moved beyond that?" Reid said Monday on the Senate floor. "The Senate can move forward on immigration if the president will stand up to those in his party who are filibustering."

Bush's immigration speech, and a later event at a Las Vegas casino that raised $400,000 for Rep. Jon Porter, R-Nev., ended a four-day stay in California. Bush is to meet at the White House Tuesday with a bipartisan group of senators on immigration.

The president said in his speech to the Orange County Business Council in Irvine, some 70 km south of Los Angeles, that a "tamper-proof ID card" for guest workers would allow the border patrol to focus on drug and gun smugglers and not people who just want to work.

"A tamper-proof card all of a sudden makes interior enforcement work," Bush said.

Bush has been criticized for appearing mostly before groups that agree with his views, but among the audience at Monday's event were some Republicans who disagree with Bush's immigration policies.

Opposition to illegal immigration is high in California's Orange County, where Minuteman Project co-founder Jim Gilchrist lives.

The president supports a guest worker program but also strengthening border enforcement.

When the Senate reconvenes this week, it is expected to take up immigration legislation that stalled two weeks ago.

The legislation contained provisions to bolster border security, start a temporary guest-worker program and provide a path for legalization of some illegal immigrants, now estimated to be as many as 12 million across the United States.

The issue has sparked demonstrations in Los Angeles and surrounding areas, as it has nationwide, with protesters particularly critical of a plan in Orange County to train police officers to enforce immigration law in connection with felony investigations.

During his speech, Bush lamented the difficulty of patrolling the border and said businesses should not lose sight that the people "sneaking across the border to do jobs" were "decent human beings."

He said that under a temporary worker plan, people "don't need to sneak across the border to do a job Americans won't do."

"So you don't have to burden our borders. We want our border patrol hunting down gun smugglers and dope runners," said Bush.