The administration has defended this approach as a means of discouraging future asylum seekers from coming to the United States. “The decision to establish family detention facilities was in large part driven by the need to create a deterrent effect,” Esther Olavarria, the senior counselor for immigration issues for the Department of Homeland Security, told me in January. When I asked Olavarria to explain the legal philosophy that permits the D.H.S. to punish one group of people — today’s migrants — merely to send a message to others, Olavarria declined. “I’m not going to opine on my philosophic views,” she said.

Two weeks after the magazine’s article appeared, a federal judge opined on precisely that question. Responding to a lawsuit filed on behalf of women and children placed in detention, Judge James E. Boasberg of the United States District Court for the District of Columbia granted a preliminary injunction to stop the deterrence policy. “The Government,” Boasberg wrote, “maintains that one particular individual may be civilly detained for the sake of sending a message of deterrence to other Central American individuals who may be considering immigration. This appears out of line with analogous Supreme Court decisions.”

In his decision, Boasberg cited our article as evidence of the damage inflicted by the policy. Under the terms of a 1997 settlement in the case of Flores v. Meese, children in the custody of immigration officials are entitled to certain protections. First, they must be granted a “general policy favoring release,” and when there is specific reason to detain them, they must be housed separately from adult strangers, in a nonsecure facility with access to regular medical care, schooling and exercise. But in my reporting, I found that hundreds of children, many of them under age 6, had been subject to a general policy favoring detention. At a facility in Artesia, N.M. — since closed — they reported sleeping eight to a room with little access to education or outdoor exercise.

Visitors to that compound, including lawyers, faith-based groups and elected officials, described an environment of rampant disease, where children lost weight rapidly under the strain of confinement. In his decision, Boasberg concluded that the conditions described in our article were a source of “irreparable harm to mothers and children.”

The decision is rather limited. Because the injunction arose from a case involving women who had not previously been detained in the United States, the decision applies to only similar families. Any women and children who have been deported in the past will continue to fall under the blanket detention policy while their cases are litigated separately. Many of those families have already spent months in legal limbo and could remain there for many months to come. Most of the women on the hunger strike fall into this uncertain category. But for cases in which D.H.S. officials are bound by the injunction and must offer bond to the detainees, advocates say they have consistently set the payment amount at a level that few asylum seekers can afford. Stephen Manning, a pro bono attorney with the American Immigration Lawyers Association, told me that some of the recent bonds have been as high as $15,000. Most are set around $7,500.