The Biden administration has tossed out a plan by the previous administration to terminate the Flores settlement, a decades-old court agreement protecting vulnerable migrant children who are in U.S. custody, CBS News reports.

The previous administration had in 2019 announced a new Health and Human Services (HHS) rule replacing the protections. After taking office, the Biden administration appeared to have been going forward with the plans. But CBS News now reports that it has removed the rule from a regulations agenda after “including it in the spring agenda earlier this year.”

As a reminder, the Flores settlement requires that when children cannot be released in a speedy and safe manner, “children must be held in the least restrictive and an appropriate setting; generally, in a non-secure facility licensed by a child welfare entity,” the Women’s Refugee Commission said.

The settlement gets its name from the case around then-15-year-old Jenny Lisette Flores, a Salvadoran child subjected to horrific abuse, including strip searches, while in U.S. custody in the mid-1980s. “The children had no education opportunities, no recreation, could not have visits with family and friends and mixed with unrelated adults,” NBC News reported in 2014. A second Salvadoran child, then-16-year-old Ana Maria Martinez Portillo, was subjected to strip and vaginal searches while in custody, the report continued. 

Yet the previous administration attempted to terminate this settlement as part of its racist and anti-child campaign, despicably calling the protections “loopholes.” Twenty states led by California and Massachusetts went to court over the previous administration’s new rule, winning a partial block of the changes. But advocates were deeply worried because it appeared the Biden administration was going forward on some form of the previous administration’s changes.

“In a filing late Friday, the Justice Department confirmed the Biden administration would no longer ‘seek to terminate’ the Flores agreement through the 2019 rules,” the report said, noting it’s “expected that the Biden administration will now work on its own rules to codify the Flores settlement, which was always intended to be replaced by regulations.”

“Guided by principles of child welfare and family unity, the Flores Settlement Agreement sets minimum standards for the detention, release, and treatment of immigrant children,” Young Center for Immigrant Children’s Rights tweeted in response to the story on Monday. “We are glad to see the Biden administration has discarded plans to terminate it.” Kids in Need of Defense tweeted that “while this is a good step forward, more oversight and safeguarding are needed to ensure children aren’t vulnerable to harm while in gov’t custody.”

This is true. The Biden administration was accused in August of violating Flores, and sued over “shockingly deplorable conditions” at some so-called “emergency” camps holding unaccompanied kids. At one site in Texas, advocates said in documents that “the reports we have received from both attorneys and clients on the conditions at Pecos are the worst we’ve ever observed.”