California Gov. Gavin Newsom has signed a bill that ends one of the most debated policies linked to Vice President Kamala Harris’ time as a prosecutor. 

According to Politico, on Wednesday, Newsom approved legislation that repeals a 2011 law making parents eligible for a misdemeanor charge if their children were chronically absent. The law, which Harris promoted as San Francisco’s district attorney and later as the state’s attorney general, defined “a chronic truant” as a student missing 10 percent or more of school days in a year.

At the time, Harris argued the policy was meant to keep young people from drifting into crime. In 2010, she told Politico that it was necessary to stop children from becoming “a menace to society hanging out on the corner.”

But the policy faced strong criticism. Many said it unfairly punished parents instead of helping families. Stories of police handcuffing mothers of chronically absent children drew national outrage and became a problem for Harris during her 2020 run for president.

“I regret that that has happened,” Harris said in 2019 about the arrests of parents. “And the thought that anything I did could have led to that, because that certainly was not the intention.”

The repeal bill, AB 461, was written by Democratic Assemblymember Patrick Ahrens, who said he was motivated by his own childhood experiences. He told reporters in June that the bill had “nothing to do with our former VP.”

The decision also comes not long after Harris published a memoir reflecting on her presidential campaign. In the book, she mentioned that Newsom was difficult to reach in the hours after President Joe Biden dropped out of the race.

The two longtime political allies, and sometimes rivals, have moved in the same San Francisco circles for years. Both later rose to statewide office—Harris to the U.S. Senate in 2016 and Newsom to governor in 2018.