After spending 43 years behind bars for a murder he did not commit, Subramanyam “Subu” Vedam has finally been freed. New evidence cleared him in early October in connection with the killing of his former roommate, BBC News reports.

However, before he could reunite with his family, Vedam was detained by officers from the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), who plan to deport him to India — a country he has not lived in since infancy. His legal team is now fighting the deportation order, while his family is campaigning for his release.

Since 1980, Vedam had been convicted of killing his 19-year-old roommate, student Tom Kinser, whose body was found nine months later in a forest with a gunshot wound to the head. Vedam was arrested, denied bail, stripped of his passport and green card, and sentenced to life imprisonment. He always maintained his innocence, and new evidence ultimately proved that he did not commit the crime.

Despite being exonerated of murder, an old drug-related conviction remains on his record, and ICE used it as grounds to detain Vedam at another facility in Pennsylvania. According to his family, decades of good behavior, earning three academic degrees, and extensive volunteer work should be taken into account when reviewing his immigration case.

The family emphasizes Vedam’s weak ties to India — he moved to the United States at just nine months old, and his close relatives live in the U.S. and Canada. His sister said that deportation would deprive him of the chance to be near his loved ones: “It’s almost as if his life has been stolen twice.”

Vedam’s attorney stated: “Deportation to a country where he has virtually no connection would be yet another terrible injustice to a man who has already endured one of the most extreme wrongful imprisonments imaginable.”