It’s rare for a judge to acknowledge that they are handing down a prison sentence for political reasons. But that is precisely what chief district judge Reed O’Connor stated from the bench in a North Texas federal courtroom this week, during the sentencing of eight defendants in one of the Prairieland cases , so named for the defendants’ participation in a July 4 demonstration at the Prairieland Detention Facility, a federal immigrant detention camp in Alvarado, Texas . In a hearing on Tuesday,