WASHINGTON (AP) — Child welfare advocates filed a federal lawsuit Tuesday asking a judge to force the Biden administration to block imports of cocoa harvested by children in West Africa that can end up in America’s most popular chocolate desserts and sweets.

The lawsuit, brought by International Rights Advocates, seeks to have the federal government enforce a 1930s era federal law that requires the government to ban products created by child labour from entering the US.

The nonprofit group says it filed the suit because Customs and Border Protection and the Department of Homeland Security have ignored extensive evidence documenting children cultivating cocoa destined for well-known US candy makers, including Hershey, Mars, Nestle and Cargill.

The major chocolate companies pledged to end their reliance on child labour to harvest their cocoa by 2005. Now they say they will eliminate the worst forms of child labor in their supply chains by 2025.

“They will never stop until they are forced to,” said Terry Collingsworth, International Rights Advocates’ executive director. He added that the US government has “the power to end this incredible abuse of African children by enforcing the law.”

Spokespeople for CBP declined to comment on the suit, which was filed in the US Court of International Trade. When asked more generally about cocoa produced by child labour, the federal agency said it was “unable to disclose additional information or plans regarding forced labour enforcement activities due to protections of law enforcement sensitive and business confidential information.”

Cocoa cultivation by children in Cote d’Ivoire, also known as the Ivory Coast, as well as neighboring Ghana, is not a new phenomenon. Human rights leaders, academics, news organisations and even federal agencies have spent the last two decades exposing the plight of children working on cocoa plantations in the West African nations, which produce about 70 per cent of the world’s cocoa supply.

A 2019 study by the University of Chicago, commissioned by the US government, found 790,000 children, some as young as five, were working on Ivory Coast cocoa plantations. The situation was similar in neighbouring Ghana, researchers found.

The US government has long recognised that child labor is a major problem in the Ivory Coast. The Department of Labor reported in 2021 that “children in Côte d’Ivoire are subjected to the worst forms of child labour, including in the harvesting of cocoa and coffee.”

The State Department in a recent report said that agriculture companies in the Ivory Coast rely on child labour to produce a range of products, including cocoa. The department said this year that human traffickers “exploit Ivoirian boys and boys from West African countries, especially Burkina Faso, in forced labour in agriculture, especially cocoa production.”

To try to force companies to abandon cocoa produced by child labour, International Rights Advocates has sued some of the world’s large chocolate companies over the use of child labor in harvesting cocoa beans. It lost a case before the Supreme Court in 2021. Several others are pending.

Pressured by lawmakers and advocates, major chocolate makers in 2001 agreed to stop purchasing cocoa produced by child labor. That goal, experts and industry officials say, has not been met.

“These companies kept saying, ‘We can’t trace it back.’ That’s BS,” said former Senator Tom Harkin, who led a push for legislation to reform the industry, but ended up agreeing to a protocol that allows corporations to regulate themselves. “They just won’t do it because it will cost them money.”

Harkin said Americans don’t realise the treats they hand their children originate with child abuse.