HOUSTON (AP) — The U.S. government has reached a new agreement to keep open a 2,400-bed detention facility used to detain immigrant mothers and children, in a profitable arrangement between a private prison company and the small South Texas town where it’s located.

• City of Dilley signed contracts with U.S. Government and private prison operator
• ICE modified an existing detention agreement with the city of Eloy, Arizona, to include the Dilley
• There are 1,975 people currently detained at the facility

Last month, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement signed a contract with the City of Dilley, where the South Texas Family Residential Center opened in 2014. Dilley signed a contract at the same time with CoreCivic, the private prison operator that runs the detention center and the largest facility of its kind in the U.S. The city released both contracts to The Associated Press last week in response to an open records request.

ICE said it was replacing an arrangement, which dated back to President Barack Obama’s administration. This year, the Department of Homeland Security’s inspector general criticized the arrangement as violating budget guidelines and wasting money. The new arrangement has some of the same features the inspector general criticized.

When the facility opened in 2014, the U.S. was seeing a surge of women and children immigrating from Central America. ICE argued it had an urgent need for family bed space and had to circumvent government standards for contracting, which required a bidding process and extensive reviews.

ICE modified an existing detention agreement with the City of Eloy, Arizona, to include the Dilley facility, 900 miles away. Eloy technically ran the facility, but routed ICE money to CoreCivic, then known as the Corrections Corporation of America.

The inspector general said in a February audit that ICE improperly modified the Eloy contract and that it should have avoided creating a “middleman” and instead reached an agreement directly with the company operating the facility.

Nina Pruneda, ICE spokeswoman, said Tuesday the agency created the agreement with Dilley in response to the inspector general’s concerns about Eloy, and that all other terms of the contract would remain the same.

ICE said detainees at Dilley are well cared for, with access to medical care and legal help.

But legal groups said immigrants are often traumatized by detention at Dilley and that some struggle to get health care.

There are 1,975 people currently detained at the facility. Some of the families at Dilley were reunited in detention after being separated under the Trump administration’s “zero-tolerance” policy that was halted in June.

Associated Press journalist Astrid Galvan in Phoenix contributed to this report.