U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), an agency within the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, has added 640 beds to a southern California detention center, raising its total capacity to 1,940.

According to the Associated Press, the detention facility, 60 miles northeast of Los Angeles, has been used to house female immigrants with criminal records, recently arrived asylum seekers, migrants with medical needs and other detainees.

David Marin, ICE's deputy field office director for enforcement and removal in Los Angeles, said increasing the privately-contracted center's capacity will help consolidate detention space because beds are expensive and hard to find in cities such as San Francisco.

The facility in Adelanto, a San Bernardino County community of about 30,000 inhabitants, is being upgraded even though the number of detained immigrants has dropped across the nation. On average, there were 26,734 immigrants housed in ICE centers each day between October 2014 and March 2015, that marks a 21-percent drop from the previous fiscal year's daily average, the newswire detailed.

Adelanto's focus on female inmates, meanwhile, has led ICE to decide to move two dozen transgender women to the facility in the next few weeks, an unidentified immigration official told Fusion. It will mark the first time the federal agency will house them alongside other women.

The previous policy of detaining transgender women in men's facilities had caused them to face increased risk of sexual assault. The detained transgender women will likely be placed in a separate area of the women's facility, however, they may be allowed to "mingle" with other female detainees, an unnamed ICE officials explained.

Olga Tomchin, a deportation defense coordinator and staff attorney at the National Day Laborer Organizing Network, warned that the policy change means anything but an improvement for transgender inmates.

"It is horrifying and outrageous that ICE has decided to subject transgender people to the infamously terrible conditions at the for-profit Adelanto detention center," Tomchin said.

Adelanto made negative headlines when a Department of Homeland Security inspection report found that the facility had "failed to provide adequate healthcare" to a Mexican immigrant who died of pneumonia in 2012, according to Fusion.