Under the night sky an armored skybox lifts its sleek head from the sand and rises into the air on hydraulic legs, jerking into place like some monstrous desert insect. At the controls, a 21-year-old Texas National Guard soldier packing a 9 mm semiautomatic sidearm watches a gray-toned screen, where figures tracked by a night-vision camera appear from behind a mesquite bush, duck behind it again, then materialize once more, moving north toward the Rio Grande. The soldier, recently returned from Iraq near the Kuwait border, watches alone in the air-conditioned box. He's looking for illegal border-crossers, just as he searched out "the enemy" -- the object of military reconnaissance -- in the other desert. From this height, an irrigation canal winds slender and graceful as a rivulet below, under a half-moon that gives just enough light to confuse the naked eye about what it might be seeing in the distance. People? Animals? Iraq prepared him for this mission, the soldier says, with experience in "staying vigilant, alert."

Later, on the ground, the soldier's partner emerges from a white vehicle parked on the canal road, packing his own Beretta, wearing a couple of ropes of extra ammunition around his neck. Will he have to use the weapon? The soldier, dressed in camouflage, stands in the dark with a million stars behind him. "I doubt it, but if I have to, I'm prepared," he says.

Five years after the events of 9/11, this is what the war on terror looks like on the West Texas border. During a rare, prime-time television address to the nation in May, President Bush announced Operation Jump Start: the deployment of 6,000 Guard troops from San Diego to Brownsville, an increase in Border Patrol personnel from its current strength of 12,000 to 18,000, and "bringing the most advanced technology" to the border line, including the kind used in Afghanistan and Iraq: more infrared cameras, motion sensors, unmanned aerial vehicles. Because of rotations, the number of National Guard expected to serve on the border in the next two years will reach into the tens of thousands. Yet Bush insists, "The United States is not going to militarize the southern border."

But the terror war here is not just marked by the coming of soldiers. It's a campaign marked by elements of low-intensity conflict, or LIC. That is the same doctrine, codified during the Reagan administration, which shaped U.S. assistance to Central American countries in the 1980s. Areas were militarized to control local populations while insurgencies flared. There's no insurgency here, but there are drug runners and unlawful immigrants. LIC includes military deployment, such as that of the Guard, and paramilitary presence, like the Minutemen, but it's more. It's a doctrine that blurs the lines between civilian and military, and between local and federal authorities. It's a doctrine that calls for militarization in the name of national security, turns civilians into suspects, puts rights at risk, changes the air, uses fear as a tool of control.

In San Elizario, a town near the skybox, neighbors often come over to Ray Carrillo's on afternoons when they want to drink a beer and shoot the breeze, and lately to talk over the change in atmosphere, a feeling like the coming of war. They call Ray Camaron, either because he was red as a shrimp when he was born "or because I'm real short." It's not just the soldiers they talk about. Citizen militias like the Minutemen-a local one is called the Border Regulators-have appeared. And they talk about the sheriff. From January to June, the El Paso County Sheriff's Department jumped the firewall between local and federal authority, setting up Operation Linebacker blockades in colonias and towns like this one, asking even U.S. citizens who looked Mexican to present papers.

Late in 2005, Gov. Rick Perry initiated Operation Linebacker "to increase both public safety and national security," distributing $10 million to date to 16 border sheriffs' departments. Perry's Linebacker is a politically mindful, "get-tough" stand, taken while immigration is exploding as a national issue. It plays well to voters who can be convinced that we have "lost control" of the border. But the cost can be high. El Paso deputies detained 860 undocumented persons under Linebacker in the first half of 2006, many with deep roots in local communities, and turned them over to the Border Patrol. Rights monitors claim public safety is being undermined because residents have become more afraid to call law enforcement for any reason, out of concern they will be asked for documents. Arguably, the air of mistrust also crimps any search for bona fide terrorists, work that depends greatly on community policing and intelligence. Not every sheriff's office in the coalition uses Linebacker funds the way El Paso does. Local enforcement chooses how grants are spent. Yet Linebacker's motivator statewide is national security, central to its drawing power for funds, and it's the kind of sanction that gives a green light to local law enforcers to become de facto federal law enforcers.

One day Carrillo, a U.S. Navy veteran, stood in his welding yard, amid machinery and tankers under repair and barking dogs. He pulled out his cell phone and called the Spanish language TV station in El Paso as neighbors and his workmen were being picked off at the roadblocks. It was a cry for help, or at least for some attention from the wider world. "I've lived here 24 years, and there's been nothing like this before," says Carrillo, a 36-year-old father of two.

"That's the Torres house, that's Martinez, that's Garcia-he's in the service-and that's Telles, the one they named the street over there for," says Carrillo on a ride through town. He waves at the driver of a passing truck. "And there goes my brother." This part of San Elizario began as a rough colonia, unimproved lots where families have seen water come to houses only in the last few years, although many, like Carrillo's mother, don't have gas yet, and sewage systems are still a dream. That means part of Camaron's business is modifying the trucks that go around cleaning septic tanks. He sweeps an arm to take in concrete brick houses rising among the nopales and pink tunas, and a developer's sign that announces: Coming Soon - Mission Style, 31 Lots. Progress in making colonias a decent place to live has come hard, but now people are scared. Households have always been a mix of citizens, legal residents, and undocumented relatives, but the war on terror is changing lives. Take a ride around other colonias east of El Paso -- Agua Dulce, Sparks, around Horizon and Montana Vista -- and you hear more. For weeks during the Linebacker stops, neighbors brought food and diapers to houses where fathers had been taken by authorities and mothers didn't dare go into the streets. Priests reported churches vacant. A clinic usually bursting with the uninsured stood empty of families, the sick unattended. Today those who are undocumented, and relatives, remain uneasy. Around San Elizario the occasional Lazy Boy or old sofa in a yard sits empty. "People used to walk around more, used to walk down along the edge of the cotton field over there along the river for exercise, late in the day," says mechanic Jessie Rubio, 46, a friend of Camaron's.

On a July morning, as Rubio spoke under a shade tree outside the family's trailer home, his 11-year-old son, Jose Luis, tinkered with a car engine, and a lone, white egret was the only other creature visible in the expanse between Rubio's yard and the line that marks the border. "What if a Minuteman mistakes me and shoots me?" he asks. Then there's the Guard. "They can make a mistake with somebody taking a stroll, because now there's too many guns and too many people. Somebody will say, 'I'm an American, you can't tell me what to do,' and there'll be trouble. Sometimes you get mad when you get asked so much for papers. You feel racism starting to climb. You can feel the tension." Being asked for papers to go to the store "felt like those countries you hear about where soldiers and police are taking over and can search you," says Rubio, whose parents immigrated from Chihuahua when he was six. He votes, and like other residents, is pleased when he reads the Border Patrol has busted drug runners. "They could hurt my son," he says. But Rubio feels less ownership of his neighborhood now, questions why it's feeling like a front line, and senses danger. "In a war situation you're looking at people and asking, 'Friend or foe?' Well, now you're getting people coming in from different parts, the Guard and Minutemen, and here we all look the same. In a war zone they don't know who is who."

Guard spokesmen reiterate that soldiers have authority only to call in the Border Patrol, not to arrest suspicious persons. Yet on the ground, fear of running into a soldier and being challenged is far greater than running into a Border Patrol agent. Partly this is because agents are familiar, but the soldiers are not. Partly it's because residents see soldiers at war on TV every day, pictured amid explosions and in combat, then, disconcertingly, see them behind their back yards. And partly fear rises because residents know soldiers who are trained for war, or recently returned from war, may have a mind-set that doesn't belong in the neighborhood. It's not an outlandish concern: Veterans Affairs Secretary R. James Nicholson told The Washington Post in October 2005 that 12 percent of returning troops from Iraq and Afghanistan seen at Veterans Administration facilities suffered from some degree of post-traumatic stress disorder. But Suzanne Dennis, an Air Force veteran of Desert Storm who returned six months ago from Baghdad deployment as a public affairs specialist with the Texas National Guard, dismissed anxiety about stressed-out soldiers on the line. "They just switch gears," Dennis says, from the battlefield to assisting the Border Patrol. "If you can't switch, you don't belong there."

Nevertheless, for those in houses near the line, living in the zone now brings a sensation of the ground shifting under their feet. For Ray Carrillo, it also comes with a hunch his role in life is changing, because what is experienced as repression demands a response. "It just clicked," says Carrillo about the moment when the Linebacker roadblocks were in full swing and the Guard was beginning to arrive. "It's illegal to ask somebody for papers without suspicion of a crime. It's not right for people to be afraid to come out of their houses." His wife wants to move a few miles east to Fabens, but now Carrillo is deciding to stick around, staying in touch with rights groups, monitoring, listening, "protecting my rights, my kids, my neighbors."

"I didn't just throw a rock and run," says Camaron about the roadblocks. "I stood my ground, in the light."

President Bush, the Border Patrol and the military declare the border is not militarized, but it is. Experts say it began years ago. In 1986, President Reagan issued a directive designating illegal drug traffic as a threat to U.S. "national security," which permitted the Department of Defense to enter a range of "anti-drug" activity, including on the border. Even before that, in 1981 Congress passed amendments that diluted the strength of the 100-year-old Posse Comitatus Act, which had strictly prohibited deputizing military to carry out domestic law enforcement. The Pentagon's Center for the Study of Low Intensity Conflict helped design the Border Patrol's "Strategic Plan: 1994 and Beyond," devoted almost entirely to immigration control.

The rhetoric of violence has taken over in a new way since September 11, 2001, replacing the language of immigration enforcement, border policy, or even drug interdiction with the language of fighting terrorism. When Gov. Perry's Border Security Plan announced support for Operation Linebacker, its overview began with these words: "Al-Qaeda leadership plans to use criminal alien smuggling organizations to bring terrorist operatives across the border into the U.S." Douglas T. Mosier, Border Patrol spokesman in El Paso, says, "Our primary objective now is preventing terrorists and instruments of terrorism from entering." Rick Glancey, spokesman for the El Paso County Sheriff's Department, says its job is the "same as the Border Patrol, preventing terrorism."

"Every day you have drugs coming in duffel bags," says Glancey, who is also interim executive director of the Texas Border Sheriff's Coalition and helped develop Linebacker. "Today narcotics, tomorrow weapons of mass destruction. Since September 11 we've seen the border is perfect for someone to take advantage of the United States. We will not let this happen on our watch, Mr. and Mrs. America, you can be sure of that."

In his downtown office, where a side table is spread with baseball hats from other lawmen's offices, Sheriff Leo Samaniego looks like a courtly grandfather, tall, 70-ish, smiling, at ease with his reputation as master of one of the best-regarded departments in the country. A civil-rights lawyer who has sparred with him legally says, "His roadblocks were a bad call, but this guy's a great sheriff." Samaniego is unrepentant about his "traffic stops" and insists they "will start again." He halted them only temporarily, he says, to "cool off" the rights groups and citizens like Camaron, who had begun receiving attention with their complaining. The fact is that 9/11 has "definitely" changed his job, the sheriff says, and there's no going back. "I'd rather be accused of overstepping my authority than sitting on my butt and doing nothing while we're in war," he says.

If the lines between local and federal authorities are blurring, so are lines between civilian and military operations. This landscape looks like Iraq. Units have arrived to assist the Border Patrol before going to the Middle East. "You can bet it can be beneficial to them," says Mosier. "They're getting used to a desert environment you can't get at a base in the East or the Midwest." Troops bring advanced military technology, different and better than what the Border Patrol has, and which only the military has the training to run. "Equipment such as that tried and tested in the Middle East can be beneficial in this kind of topography," Mosier says. "If that technology is applicable and feasible (there is) no reason to think it won't be considered for future use."

For Mosier, having soldiers on the border is not militarization, but "homeland security in support of a very real and vital mission." From the Border Patrol to the National Guard, the word is consistent: Soldiers in Operation Jump Start, President Bush's initiative, have no direct law enforcement duties. They are here to provide force protection, free up Border Patrol agents until more can be trained, bring technology, to be "more eyes and ears." But the reality is that soldiers are trained to kill and deal with an "enemy." Local residents understand this. When the nearby city of Sunland Park, New Mexico, received a request from the Border Patrol's El Paso sector to station National Guard soldiers on the city's hill of Cristo Rey, a pilgrimage site topped by a monumental white cross visible from Mexico and frequented mostly by faithful from Texas, residents rebelled. The City Council voted to deny the right-of-entry permit. "Militarily trained is not Border Patrol trained," says a 35-year-old El Paso native who picnics on the hill. "The Border Patrol doesn't walk up to you with a weapon pulled-people are afraid of others running around there with M-16s."

There is another reason more military personnel will be coming to El Paso: Fort Bliss is set to receive 20,000 new soldiers in the next five years (present number: 13,000). Spokesmen say the influx is not part of a strategy to strengthen military presence on the border, but due instead to re-stationing of units from overseas and from installations closed in the armed forces' Base Realignment and Closure process. Did the strategic border location of Fort Bliss affect the BRAC decision not to close it, when the process eliminated so many others? "Not to my knowledge," says Public Affairs Officer Jean Offut. Furthermore, the base "has nothing to do" with National Guard stationed in and around El Paso, or with their assignments.

No matter what the reason for supersizing Fort Bliss, the effect is a sensation of further militarization of the community, says Timothy Dunn, a border scholar (The Militarization of the U.S.-Mexico Border 1978-1992) and sociologist at Salisbury University in Maryland. "Also, that means there's a much bigger pool to draw upon for border duty by JTF North." Originally called JTF-6, in 1997 Marines in the anti-drug joint task force, supporting the Border Patrol, shot and killed an 18-year-old American named Esequiel Hernandez as he tended family goats in rural Redford, Texas. The Marines were never charged. JTF-6 morphed into JTF North, based at Fort Bliss, now charged with supporting law enforcers such as the Border Patrol with "interdiction of suspected transnational threats." That's fence and road building, but it's also training, and that's "not innocuous," says Dunn. "It's militaristic stuff including interrogation techniques, booby traps and weapons. A large part of low-intensity conflict doctrine always has been U.S. military units training local forces. What happens is that military thinking comes to have a role in civilian enforcement."

Nearly half the 11 million undocumented immigrants in the United States entered legally and overstayed visas. Most illegal drugs enter in otherwise legitimate cargo and traffic. Operations Jump Start and Linebacker don't affect them. Meanwhile, the poor of Mexico and Central America continue to regard work in the United States as a lifeline, even if they must come illegally to grab it. Absent coherent domestic and multilateral policy, the war on the border, like the war on terror, is endless, and increasingly dangerous. "It's like two tsunamis, one coming up from the south, and increased militarization coming from the north, set to clash at the border," says University of Texas at El Paso political scientist and border researcher Tony Payan. "There is a need for a way to accommodate the flow."

In a new study, The Three U.S.-Mexico Border Wars: Drugs, Immigration, and Homeland Security, Payan suggests that the "real failure" of 9/11 was the lack of intelligence coordination to detect and apprehend potential terrorists entering anywhere. Mexican border security became a special focus, with law enforcement redefined as a matter of national security. The focus carries hostility not only to crossers but those who live in the area, "an escalation that has not paid off" because workers and drugs are coming at the same rate as five years ago. What has changed toward undocumented workers since 9/11, as Payan puts it, is "the perception of intentionality," that "this is not someone coming to take a job, but someone who will harm America."

Under a midday sun, the skeleton of a big river crab lies intact on the flat, baked earth. Which of the twigs coming out of the ground are motion sensors? Which are bare plants? A green and white Border Patrol car appears out of nowhere. The agent asks a few questions and seems in no hurry to drive away. He's been on the job 16 years, he says. Sure, it's fine that the Guard are here, but he doesn't figure it will change his job much, endlessly patrolling this line. Has he ever been in danger? Well, the drug runners have taken to throwing big rocks at the patrol cars, which is dangerous if one hits while he's driving fast. Sometimes the rocks smash right through the windshield, which cuts off the chase because it's all you can do to keep the car from flipping. He wants to make sure I'm not confused, not thinking it's the migrants trying to sneak into the country who throw the stones. "It's the drug ones, you know, not the ones coming to work." Later, on another part of the line where bushes grow, where it's possible to climb down to the cool river, where a Mexican family on the other side has spread its cloth to eat lunch, another agent drives up, this one brusque. "Be careful around here, like if you go down to the river, because if we see you coming up, we don't know who you are," he says.

On another day, as light fades in the August sky, Texas National Guardsmen inside a windowless camera room are intent on a bank of full-light screens and pink-toned night vision screens, working joysticks to pan the views, watching "bodies," as they call them, figures on the Mexican side of the river. "I was doing basically the same thing in Iraq, entry points, vehicles, looking for suspicious activity," says a 33-year-old from El Paso back from Tikrit. "There they were penetrating the wall around our base. This is like they're penetrating our home. We don't want terrorists to come in." Another soldier watches for "massing," a gathering of several figures who might come across in a group and overwhelm a single agent. But El Paso has been flooded with rains, and the same river that was low just a few days before runs full and treacherous now. "You'd have to be crazy to try that river tonight," says a 20-year-old Specialist 4. "Or desperate."

Nevertheless, hours after sunset Senior Border Patrol Agent Rogelio Garcia is driving the levee roads, amid tumbleweeds that blow up in the dark, catching jackrabbits in the headlight beams, his radio crackling with traffic from soldiers in the camera room and agents on the borderline who are spotting the crazy, or desperate, crossers. Visual on six to eight subjects... Changing clothes... Bodies up on the levee now... Those bodies are running back now... Garcia throws the SUV into four-wheel drive, driving expertly, ready for sinkholes on flats near the marsh. Another radio voice. Five to six subjects. Goin' up. Running north from Duty exit. "Well, night is the busiest time," says Garcia, who joined the Border Patrol six years ago. Two spotters... Four guys crouching... Agents respond. Outside San Elizario, Garcia rolls to a stop. From the levee an agent in a patrol car is "cutting" north across the sand with his flashlight beam, looking for tracks. Dogs are barking; other agents search a yard with flashlights. Garcia peers into a ditch. For now, they get away. Watching these agents, it's clear that they are well trained, ready for anything. Some have specialized degrees, many served in the armed forces themselves. Deterrence through ubiquity and obvious surveillance is the policy, but if someone breaches the line, they know the pathways. It seems tonight that only the sheer number of those who try to cross the border illegally means some get through.

Garcia drives more miles along the borderline, until he pulls up alongside a white pickup. Inside, an agent is behind the wheel, watching a small, green screen divided into quadrants mounted on his dashboard. Standing high in the truck bed is a FLIR, or forward looking infrared camera, trained south. Only days before, a lone patroller nearby captured a group of 10 migrants, and two drug runners with 90 pounds of marijuana in duffels. Without the FLIR, says the agent at the dashboard screen, that lone patroller would have caught the escaping drug runners, but missed the drugs they jettisoned, which the FLIR's eye saw. Garcia is thoughtful. "Every day what we're doing out here is a war against terror-after 9/11 that became number one," he says. And "you can't say it's militarizing the border" to have the soldiers here. "You don't see military vehicles running up and down the line, and again, the Guard has no direct power to arrest." The desert is silent except for the cry of cicadas. The FLIR agent never takes his eyes off the screen, and suddenly he is sending a message. One spotter trying to get on the river... Should pop out any minute...

For the savvy investor looking for a growth industry, South Texas offers a sure thing. The business calculus is simple: More immigrants than ever are being apprehended. That means the federal government needs more detention centers and more people to run them. No matter how the national debate on immigration plays out in Congress, the corporations that have moved into the business of building and operating detention centers are likely to see a steady stream of revenue for years to come.

The United States Marshals Service, for example, is now soliciting bids from private companies to build, own, and operate a 2,800-bed detention facility near Laredo. The "superjail," as it has come to be called, will serve the federal criminal court in downtown Laredo, which is loaded up with immigration-related cases in what the Marshals Service calls an "emergency [detention] situation." The $100-million superjail is expected to be one of the largest private detention centers in the nation, and will join a growing chain of county and local jails and private detention facilities all over Texas that coordinate with federal agencies to hold immigrants -- some destined for trials or hearings, others for deportation.

From downtown San Antonio to the banks of the Rio Grande in South Texas, for-profit companies run seven detention facilities for the Marshals Service and for Immigration and Customs Enforcement, a division of the Department of Homeland Security. ICE (formerly the Immigration and Naturalization Service) holds noncitizen detainees waiting for a hearing in the civil immigration courts, or facing immediate deportation. The Marshals Service is responsible for housing both citizens and noncitizens awaiting trial or sentencing in federal criminal court.

"It's the immigrant gold rush in South Texas," says Bob Libal, co-director of Grassroots Leadership, an Austin-based nonprofit that monitors the private prison industry. "In Texas, almost all of the current prison expansion is occurring to house immigrant detainees, and that's primarily located in South Texas along the border." There are at least 7,000 newly built or proposed ICE and Marshals Service beds in Texas for immigrant detainees, according to Corrections Professional, an industry journal. In the early 1980s, ICE (then INS) operated zero beds in Texas; the Marshals Service, no more than 3,000 in the entire country.

Nationwide, the number of ICE detainees went from 7,444 in 1994 to about 23,000 now; during the same period, the Marshals Service's population more than doubled to an estimated 63,000. Just in the last two years, Congress has authorized 40,000 new ICE beds over the next five years and given the Marshals Service funding for another 4,000 to 5,000. And the President's proposed 2007 budget calls for a $452 million increase in ICE funding, including money for another 6,700 beds. One of the companies to benefit from the government's building -- and privatizing -- binge is KBR, a Halliburton Co. subsidiary, which in January was awarded a contract worth up to $385 million to build temporary immigrant detention facilities for the Homeland Security Department in case of an "emergency influx of immigrants," according to a KBR press release. The top companies running South Texas detention centers are the Corrections Corp. of America (CCA), GEO Group Inc., and Emerald Correctional Management.

Libal says a "perfect storm" explains the growth in the detention industry. "First, you have this kind of anti-immigrant sentiment coming out of Washington at the federal level; second, you have increased zealotry from the U.S. Attorney's office to prosecute people criminally for extremely minor immigration crimes; and third, you have these private prison companies that are cashing in on the immigration incarceration boom."

The origins of the modern immigrant detention complex can be traced to the mid-1990s, when Silvestre Reyes, then-head of the El Paso Border Patrol Sector (now a Democratic congressman from El Paso), initiated "Operation Blockade" -- a strategy of concentrating enforcement agents to snag immigrants once they cross the border. This drove up the number of apprehensions and set in motion a militarization of the southwestern border. The budget for border enforcement went from $1.2 billion in 1995 to $4.7 billion in 2006, and the number of Border Patrol agents doubled. In addition, sweeping immigration reform laws passed in 1996 by Congress and signed by President Bill Clinton allowed the deportation of any noncitizen convicted of such crimes as drunk driving, hot-check writing, and shoplifting -- even if the crime occurred before the law went into effect. The 1996 legislation also required mandatory detention of any illegal immigrant deemed a "criminal alien," a noncitizen convicted or even suspected of illegal activity.

But in recent years, the Homeland Security Department has forged into new territory. With its Secure Border Initiative, the agency seeks to find and deport certain noncitizens, whether they are seized at the border or are living within the United States. One feature of the initiative is the elimination -- by this October -- of the so-called "catch-and-release" policy, in which undocumented immigrants are released on their own recognizance and given a notice to appear in immigration court at a later date. (About 40 percent failed to make an appearance in 2005, according to the Justice Department's Executive Office for Immigration Review.)

The Office of Detention and Removal, a sub-agency of ICE, calls its 10-year plan "Endgame," the goal of which is to "remove all removable aliens" by 2012, including the 590,000 people who have ignored deportation orders and the 630,000 "criminal aliens" serving sentences in jail or prison at any given time. The 6,700 new ICE detention beds requested in the 2007 budget represent a much greater number of potential deportees -- that's enough to allow an additional 134,000 people per year to be moved through the system. John Ferguson, CEO of Corrections Corp., spoke to analysts during a conference call on company earnings in February about the "significant opportunities" the Secure Border Initiative would bring: "ICE bed needs under the Secured Border Initiative [sic] potentially could be all private. ICE does not build their own facilities." Libal, the private prison critic, says companies like CCA "are right to be optimistic. They have the potential to get a whole slew of new contracts."

The Secure Border Initiative also puts into place another controversial enforcement strategy: "expedited removal," which requires mandatory detention and rapid deportation of certain undocumented border-crossers. Originally authorized under the 1996 law, expedited removal was set up in the McAllen and Laredo sectors as a pilot project called "Texas Hold 'Em" in August 2004. It has recently expanded to the full lengths of the Mexican and Canadian borders. The Homeland Security Department initially targeted Texas because the state receives the vast majority of non-Mexican immigrants. (Unlike Mexicans -- 92 percent of which are rapidly returned after apprehension -- "other than Mexicans" cannot be quickly sent home and are often released for lack of detention space.) Under expedited removal, undocumented non-Mexicans captured within 100 miles of the border who have been in the country for less than 14 days are held in detention facilities until they can be shipped back to their nation of birth, a process that can take a few days to a few months.

These detainees have no right to an attorney and are barred from returning to the United States for at least five years. Each person subject to expedited removal is supposed to be evaluated by an immigration-enforcement agent to ensure that they do not fall into a protected category, such as a bona fide asylum-seeker or a lawful permanent resident. Immigration advocates and attorneys worry that these agents lack the training or incentives to properly evaluate an immigrant's rights.

"It's a very summary procedure, lacking in the fundamental due process rights," says Meredith Linsky, director of South Texas Pro Bono Asylum Representation, a Harlingen-based organization. She argues that many individuals with a legal right to enter or remain in the United States are swept up by expedited removal and whisked out of the country. "Everything has changed" since she first arrived in Harlingen in 1989, Linsky says. "In 1989, everyone that was apprehended was given a bond, given the opportunity to go in front of an impartial judge. ...Today people are apprehended, and for the most part they are arrested, judged, tried, and removed in one fell swoop by the [Border Patrol] officer at the border with no legal representation."

Nina Pruneda, an ICE spokeswoman, hotly disputes Linsky's portrayal of the process. "First off, they're not low-level officers," she says. "Second of all, they are trained professionals in the expertise of customs and enforcement law; third, everyone is afforded the due process of law -- they can go up before an immigration judge; fourth, a lot of people do not necessarily interpret themselves as who they are." At present, Pruneda says, the San Antonio district, which covers 54 counties in Texas, is removing 500 to 600 people per week under the deportation program.

Pruneda argues that expedited removal, if run efficiently, cuts down on the time individuals spend in detention, freeing up detention space for illegal aliens who pose a threat to public safety. She says the average length a person on the expedited removal track spends in detention has been reduced from 90 days to 15 to 20 days. Still, the number of people subject to mandatory detention under the new rules is enormous. Immigration agents catch an estimated one million illegal entrants per year, with additional untold tens of thousands who slip through. Already, in an indication of what may happen in other border regions, South Texas detention centers are chock-a-block with non-Mexicans being processed for expedited removal.

Nearly 100 percent of the detainees in the CCA facility in Laredo and in a GEO Group center in Pearsall are being kept under expedited removal, says David Walding, interim director of the new Bernardo Kohler Center in Kyle, a nonprofit that provides assistance to detainees in South Texas detention facilities. But, he adds, echoing a nearly universal sentiment among advocates, "A lot of these people who get removed are just going to turn around and come right back."

If they do, their chances of being prosecuted on immigration-related criminal charges are greater than ever. Over the past five years, the federal courts' Southern District of Texas, which serves the region from Houston to Laredo, has exploded with noncitizens accused of federal immigration crimes. In 2005, the district tried 4,802 defendants accused of major immigration crimes, a 155 percent increase over 2001 levels, according to statistics compiled by the federal courts. The number of defendants charged with petty immigration offenses in southern Texas was up 260 percent between 2001 and 2004.

Together, the Southern District and the Western District of Texas, the other federal court district, had 80 percent of all minor immigration defendants in the nation, the majority of which were charged with illegal entry. According to Marjorie Meyers, the chief federal defender in the Southern District, more than 50 percent of the cases her public defenders handle each year in the border courts are "illegal entry" and "illegal re-entry," infractions that are committed hundreds of thousands of times each year at the border as people cross illegally back and forth.

Immigration attorneys and advocates have watched with a mixture of amazement and apprehension as the U.S. Attorney's office has increasingly focused on nailing border-crossers. "When I first started practicing immigration law many years ago, the only people that were prosecuted for illegal entry were people who had entered before or people who were doing something else wrong when they were entering," says Barbara Hines, director of the immigration law clinic at the University of Texas Law School. "I think that's really changed -- the people who are being prosecuted [now] are coming for the first time, who have no other criminal record, and they are being prosecuted and serving jail time." Sentences can range from probation to up to 20 years if the individual has an "aggravated felony" on record.

Nancy Herrera, executive assistant U.S. attorney for the Southern District, says that district attorneys in border districts decided in 2002 to take more cases to end the "revolving door" of repeat immigration offenders. "It's an effort to deter illegal entry to the United States while protecting the border," she says. But their defense counterparts have their own theories. "It is clear, and I have heard the U.S. Attorney's office say, that they choose to bring an illegal entry charge so they're on the books," says Myers. While an illegal entry charge usually carries no more than 30 days in jail, most noncitizens convicted of illegal re-entry receive between about four and eight years in jail if they have priors on their record, including immigration crimes, says Meyers. Lisa Brodyaga, an attorney in San Benito, elaborates: "A lot of the people they are prosecuting are garden-variety undocumented. The reason I think they are doing that is so if they catch them again, they can give them prison time." Illegal re-entry is a felony. As a result, she says, they are "pushing undocumented people deeper and deeper underground ... so they are more and more exploitable."

The stepped-up prosecution of immigration violations has obvious effects on the court system. An Observer analysis of data obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request shows that in 2004, the most recent year for which statistics are available, at least 71 percent of the 8,785 criminal charges at the federal courthouse in Laredo were immigration-related, the vast majority for illegal entry. In fact, nationwide, immigration has recently surpassed drugs as the #1 federally prosecuted crime. Good-bye War on Drugs, hello War on Immigration.

As the number of criminal prosecutions increases, the civil immigration courts then receive more noncitizens branded as "criminal aliens." "Most federal immigration enforcement crimes also have deportation grounds," explains Lee Teran, a law professor at St. Mary's University Law School in San Antonio, which makes it easier for the government attorney, a Homeland Security employee, to secure an order of removal in immigration court.

Take, for example, the case of Maria Cardenas, a 27-year-old resident of Laredo. She is a lawful permanent resident who has lived in Texas since she came from Mexico at 15 with her parents. Employed as a truck driver, she was getting ready to make a run from Laredo to San Antonio in her 18-wheeler last July. At a gas station, an undocumented man from Mexico asked her for a ride, telling her he had diabetes and needed to work for his family. Cardenas agreed, later saying she felt sorry for the man. Cardenas knew she was doing something illegal, but her compassion got in the way of sober thinking.

At a Border Patrol checkpoint on Interstate 35, agents discovered the man hidden in Cardenas' truck. She was arrested and taken in front of a magistrate judge in Laredo the next day. She received one year of unsupervised probation and thought the ordeal was over. But then Cardenas was taken into ICE custody and put in an immigrant detention facility run by the GEO Group in San Antonio. Now, she faces deportation to Mexico and a bar on returning for 10 years unless her lawyer can muster a legal defense allowing her to remain. If she were to return, she could face up to 20 years in prison. Winning Cardenas' case, her attorney says, will not be easy.

What will she do if she has to go back to Mexico? "I have a life here," she says in an interview, beginning to cry. "There's nothing in Mexico for me. I've always worked and paid my taxes. I've been a good resident." For each day of Cardenas' 10-day stay in detention, she likely fetched between $35 and $65 gross profit (the going rate in the region) for GEO Group.

As Texas moves deeper into the corporate-run detention center business, immigrant advocates worry about how much public scrutiny will be possible. "I think that immigrants are definitely more exploitable than even state or federal prisoners because they often have less access to resources and they are often deported after their detention," says Libal. "They tend to be a transient population; they tend to have language problems."

And once new detention centers are built, it is likely that the facilities will be open for business indefinitely, private prison opponents say. "They might pitch [new prisons] as a way to solve some temporary need," says Libal, "but once they build the prisons, they will always fill the beds, especially with private facilities." He points out that prison companies usually want to sign contracts with federal agencies that guarantee a minimum number of prisoners per month, legally binding the government to supply the bodies. In Laredo, the superjail has engendered the enthusiastic bidding of five corrections outfits, including CCA and the GEO Group, which are jostling to corner the emerging borderland markets. CCA has offered to pay the $100 million construction cost if it wins the contract, while GEO Group told Webb County that the company would give $1 million to the impoverished county for indigent care if it prevails.

So far, the rise in the immigrant detention business has received little attention as the national debate splits the business community and leaves Republican ideologues arguing with pragmatists. But the Office of Detention and Removal is hard at work on what it calls the "Endgame." For the corporations involved in immigrant detention, the endgame is the beginning of something big.

Juliet Schor's latest book, Born to Buy: The Commercialized Child and the New Consumer Culture, represents the culmination of many things: her training as an economist and sociologist, her ongoing analysis of consumer culture in previous books (The Overworked American: The Unexpected Decline of Leisure and The Overspent American: Upscaling, Downshifting and the New Consumer), and her own experience as a mother.

Born to Buy examines the increased involvement of children in consumer culture, specifically as targets of advertising, and the resulting effect on their well-being. Schor balances her well-researched presentation of rather alarming data with a voice that is not alarmist, but practical, informative, and readable.

In many ways her conclusion comes as no surprise. Readers may be surprised, however, by her data -- namely, the sheer volume of marketing to which children are exposed. According to Schor, the advertising industry spent $100 million on marketing to children in 1983; by 2004 that amount had increased to $15 billion. Advertisements saturate television, radio, and print media. More disturbing, however, is the extent to which marketers have infiltrated schools, the Internet, airplanes, restrooms, and essentially every other public space available.

These ads are the product of some of the finest anthropological research and creative thinking in the marketing business. Techniques such as anti-adultism, which pits children against adults in the struggle for marketed goods, and age compression, which targets children of younger and younger ages, combine with all the traditionally manipulative advertising techniques to create a culture in which children do not merely consume, but also find their identity in consumption.

The effect on children's psychological, physical, and social health is, predictably, deplorable. Schor notes the dramatic increase in incidences of depression, anxiety, low self-esteem, obesity, and psychosomatic disorders.

With their characteristically underestimated precociousness, children are not wholly unaware of this trend. Before I spoke with Juliet Schor, I ate lunch with children at the school where I teach. I explained to them that I was interviewing a woman who had written a book saying that children today saw more commercials than ever before. I asked them if they thought it was true.

"Well, yeah," they shrugged. "They're everywhere on the television and the computer." They went back to their lunch: chips in flashy containers, yogurt with movie characters on the package, and sweets upon sweets.

What is it, compared to children's advertising in the past or to adult advertising, that makes marketing to children so dangerous now?

Juliet Schor: Well, there's the volume. The sort or extent of media and ad exposure has increased enormously, along with the amount of stuff that kids have. It's taking over a greater and greater volume of kids' time use, activities, mental space, and physical space. It's the shift towards getting into very basic processes of identity and social connection and esteem, which is new.

Who is responsible for regulating this marketing phenomenon?

A lot depends on the ad. If it's going on television, the network has an office within it. There's a so-called self-regulation, a set of industry guidelines that companies say they adhere to, but in fact compliance is not that great and there's a very limited apparatus for enforcement of those guidelines. In any case, they're not binding.

I saw a study from the CARU, Children's Advertising Review Unit, which is part of the Better Business Bureau, showing that CARU claims they have 97 percent compliance, which is bogus. There are no penalties for not complying, the companies say they're complying and they're not. Sham may be too strong a word, but there are some sham aspects to it, particularly recently when you've had a lot of changing practices and a lot of competition in the industry. Television ads are the most regulated part of [children's advertising]. When you start getting out of TV, although CARU is nominally covering it, it has a small staff, and the volume of kids' ads is enormous. They basically are reacting to complaints that are brought to them. But there are not that many complaints because there's no formal body that's reviewing all these ads.

Can consumers make those complaints?

Yes, yes. You can also complain directly to the companies, and I think that's something to really push with your readership. When the public gets involved and complains we see a lot of cases where we're getting companies' response.

You describe general guidelines. With toys they have to show the toys in realistic settings for a certain amount of time in the commercial. This cuts down on overt exaggerations; they can't advertise a costume cape and show a kid flying because that can't actually happen. But does this standard in some way make advertisements more insidious? If an ad has to be believable to a certain extent, does that make the message subtler and more manipulative?

I think it really depends. For the little kids, I think that those flashy claims are really powerful, but for the older kids that won't work. They know that you can't fly just because you put a cape on. I think the point is that the whole regulatory system is responding to the techniques of yesteryear, which were to show products doing miraculous things they can't do to try and get kids to want them. That's not the way advertising is done today.

Today, we see the rise of symbolic messaging, which means it's less about the product than about the social meaning and the symbolism of the product. So, you say: This product makes you cool. Now, I think a good case could be made to CARU and the companies that that's magical thinking, that's fantasy, but they haven't interpreted it that way. They interpret it in such a narrow and strict way. But the symbolic messages I would say are more powerful than the messages which are about "Wow, look. This product can do this amazing stuff!"

So the method is: This cape, sure it won't actually make you fly, but it will make you happy -- that's just as fantastical, really.

It's a really important point, which hasn't really come out in the debates the way it needs to.

And yet, the industry asserts that they empower kids through marketing. What is their basic argument for why what they do is beneficial to kids, or at least not harmful?

Actually there are a lot who are unhappy and uneasy with what they're doing. That came out of my own research and also in a survey that was done of kids' marketers in which many of them expressed reservations, although they mostly pointed at other people -- "My colleagues, they're the problem," and so forth.

The major line of defense is "We need to make money." In some way this goes without saying, but it should be said because what it shows is a pernicious and instrumental relationship to kids. Now, their two other biggest lines of defense are, [firstly], that the problems are really coming from parents -- but this is kind of an incoherent argument.

I mean let's say junk food: It doesn't let you off the hook to be pushing it just because you can also point to another actor in the chain of events who is doing something wrong. The idea that they are empowering kids is a more complex one, and a more defensible one in the following sense: The idea that kids should get to be consumers, that they should have commercials and products oriented to them and that they like; all of those things I agree with. One of my marketer informants said to me in a discussion of all this research, "Well, do you think it would be better if we made products that kids didn't want or like?" My answer to that is no; but it's easy to get kids to want stuff that's not good for them and you need a balance between that empowerment and the messages and products [themselves] and I think that balance is missing.

As a teacher -- and in your case as a parent -- I agree it is important to give kids autonomy and choices, but at the same time they're kids, and they're not making choices with the same resources we have available to us.

There are people who argue you shouldn't do any advertising to kids because they have a hard time processing and resisting it. They aren't really up to it in some pretty fundamental way. I think that's a reasonable point of view. It partly depends on the age you're talking about. What's curious is in the survey that was done of marketers that I mentioned earlier, most of the marketers didn't differ too much from the child psychologists on when they thought kids could really resist the persuasive intent of advertising; the marketers say 11-and-a-half years and the child psychologists say 12 years.

So one question is whether you think there should be a sort of fairness as law. The two key principles of advertising law are deceptiveness and fairness. Well, they're violating deceptiveness all the time. That's become a huge business, deceptive advertising, whether we're talking product placement or word of mouth advertising, stealth advertising in school, or curricula advertising.

The second question: Is it fair to advertise to kids, do they have the ability to withstand the pull of the advertisement? The research suggests that kids below 12 have limited abilities to do that and the younger you get the more limited and impaired they are in understanding what an ad is and [its] purpose. That's a huge issue that the industry refuses to confront. When it says we're just empowering kids, it's making that argument in the face of a significant body of scholarly literature that casts doubt on the basic enterprise.

And yet, as they claim, they can't be held entirely responsible. One marketing technique is to respond to kids' stress�how is it that other adults, including parents and teachers, help unwittingly create a situation in which kids are vulnerable to advertising messages?

Well, I'm not sure we understand all the aspects of childhood stress today, but certainly adults have set up the institutions and practices that children exist in to a large extent. One thing that seems like a part of it to me is the very high expectations placed on kids for achievement in many different arenas; I think also just the way they're being brought up.

There's something about the way kids are living today that's leading to much higher levels of stress. Whatever it is, it's something about the way we have constructed the world; it's not a natural fact. Stress levels have gone up so much -- it's not just part of the human condition.

We all grow up with negative outside influences, no matter what they are, and yet if we're lucky, at some point we become self aware and discerning enough to sort through them. Considering that we can't totally censor everything kids are exposed to, how is it that we can help give them the tools to process consumer culture so that ultimately they can be happy and healthy, despite everything that's around them?

What I've tried to do in my own life is de-commercialize the household. I think that's a really key part of it. Turning off the TV and other media is key. Secondly, diet: not eating junk food, so you're cooking tasty, nutritious food. Eating together as a family, having a strong family life is important. And the third thing I talk about is reclaiming the outdoors for kids. If kids have to be indoors it's very difficult to limit the media exposure. Especially with the young ones where you just need too much adult time.

One of the big differences between the way kids are growing up today and the way generations in the past did is that, in the past, kids had more access to the outdoors on their own. And that's really key. It allows them to create peer networks, to interact with each other, to have independence�all of those things that are necessary for growing up to be a good and healthy person.

There isn't a magic answer to it, but basically you create a good healthy environment for the whole family. And then try to do the same thing in your schools and other institutions.