The Trump administration has been processing immigration cases at 26 Federal Plaza amid “overcrowded, squalid, and degrading” detention conditions, says Manhattan Federal Judge Lewis Kaplan, who has ordered it be permanently cleaned up and that people in custody no longer be denied access to medical care or their lawyers.

This is the exact same place where there are new immigration courtrooms on the third floor that, unlike the older courtrooms on the 12th and 14th floors, are off limits to visitors, making for a secret court, a violation of a foundational part of a free society, going back centuries. Courts, all courts, must be open to the public.

As Kaplan wrote in his 127-page opinion, “The Constitution demands humane treatment of everyone in government custody. It requires that they receive due process of law. And it limits the Executive to enforcing the laws that Congress has enacted rather than doing whatever it wishes.”

ICE wants to move immigrants quickly through the motions of due process before deportations that so often rip longtime residents away from jobs, families and communities where they’d set down roots and been living and contributing without incident for years or decades.

DHS has been keeping the third floor off limits, even though this policy runs counter to both federal law that presumptively makes immigration courts open to the public and a June court order by Federal Judge Colleen McMahon directing the government to stop blocking public access precisely in response to similar antics.

Contrary to the administration’s apparent beliefs, it does not have the power under our constitutional system to decide which laws it will comply with, when, and which federal court orders it can ignore. It is not up to DHS to determine who can sit in public courts. Anyone who wants to watch, from the press to advocates to families to just causal observers, must have that unfettered ability.

Instead, what ICE did was set up a video monitor system upstairs and installed cameras down on the third floor, which prevented all contact with anyone in the court proceedings. That is not good enough and it shouldn’t have to take Judge McMahon or Judge Kaplan or another one of their colleagues to have to order that the third floor courtrooms be opened up.

Whenever a government tries to control access to a court process where there are no sensitivities like confidential informants or survivors of domestic abuse or national security secrets, the natural question to have is what is it that they are hoping to hide.

Thanks to Kaplan’s order, we know that the nonpublic detention conditions were atrocious. As for the public courtrooms, they must remain open to all who wish to enter and watch the proceedings.

The proceedings must be fair with access to attorneys and families, they must be open, detention must be humane. None of these basics should even be at issue.

Too often has ICE simply grabbed people who disappear one day, never to be heard from again. That is exactly why they should not be allowed to operate under this veil of obscurity; secret courts should never be a reality in our country. If federal officials need to be held in contempt over it, so be it.

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