After years of litigation and argument, the Federal Government agreed in 1998 to a simple standard for how children being held by immigration authorities should be treated. They should be kept, in the words of the agreement, "in the least restrictive environment possible." To put it simply, Judge Dolly Gee ruled last month, these children should not be kept in prisons. After visiting a brand new $290 million Federal Detention Center in Dilley, Texas, for border-crossing children and their mothers, Judge Gee called it "astonishing," because as Santa Fe immigration attorney Allegra Love told KSFR's Dave Marash on HERE AND THERE, the place mothers and children were being kept was a prison.
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