A federal judge's ruling ordering the Obama administration to release children from family detention centers was met with approval.

According to Judge Dolly Gee's order, the administration should comply to release children and their parents "without unnecessary delay" if they do not have a flight risk or threat to national security, NBC News reported. The ruling, which was released on Friday evening, gives the administration until Oct. 23 to abide by the order.

Kica Matos, spokeswoman for the Fair Immigration Reform Movement, said that detention centers are not fit to hold children, urging the federal government to shut down the family facilities, NBC News added.

Jeanne Atkinson, executive director of Catholic Legal Immigration Network, also pushed the Obama administration "to fully comply with Judge Gee's order and end the practice of family detention completely and replace it with more humane and less expensive alternatives to detention such as case management with legal services," the news outlet noted.

Plenty of unaccompanied minors and families arrived on the border in 2014 hoping for a safe haven in the U.S. In the same year, Border Patrol picked up 68,541 unaccompanied minors and 68,445 families, NBC News wrote.

Gee's order comes a month after the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) asked the judge to allow the department to continue detaining children and parents caught at the border, adding that they have been hurrying the families' release. The DHS also insisted that the apprehended illegal immigrants "could heighten the risk of another surge in illegal migration across our Southwest border by Central American families," NBC News reported.

On Friday, Gee rejected DHS' heightened illegal migration argument, saying that the statement "is speculative at best, and, at worse, fear-mongering," the news outlet added.

In a statement issued on Saturday, the department said that it will "continue to screen family members' claims as expeditiously as possible," and that it will review the judge's ruling and "consider available options with the Department of Justice," the Los Angeles Times reported.

The DHS continued, "While we continue to disagree with the court's ultimate conclusion, we note that the court has clarified its original order to permit the government to process families apprehended at the border at family residential facilities consistent with congressionally provided authority."

In July, Gee found that the government had breached 1997's Flores agreement, which sets the legal requirements for the treatment of the children apprehended by immigration authorities, Los Angeles Times noted.

Gee's ruling last week repeated that the temporary holding cells have "deplorable conditions" and have fallen short of the most basic "safe and sanitary" standards ordered by the 1997 settlement, NBC News added.