A Venezuelan man who is among the hundreds of individuals that the Trump administration has sent to an infamous Salvadoran mega-prison said while in U.S. detention in February that he “just wanted to go home,” according to a court filing Wednesday.

Edicson David Quintero Chacón, a father of two small children, is now languishing behind bars at Centro de Confinamiento del Terrorismo, or CECOT. The prison’s torturous conditions are now front-page news in the United States, as lawyers and human rights groups accuse the Trump administration of enacting forced disappearances against hundreds of innocent men.

Quintero’s ongoing detention could “amount to an effective life sentence—and possibly a death sentence,” his lawyers, one of whom was appointed by a federal district court last week, said in a new habeas corpus petition filed Wednesday. Habeas corpus is the legal principle that detention must be justified.

The lawyers argued for Quintero to be released from CECOT, saying his ongoing detainment violates his Fifth Amendment rights and the Constitution’s due process clause, among a slew of other violations. They alleged that the Trump administration used the Salvadoran prison as a way to get around legal limits on the detention of people in immigration custody.

“My family and I can’t sleep or eat because we’re thinking about Edicson,” an unnamed family member of Quintero’s said in a press release from the American Immigration Council Wednesday. That group, along with the National Immigration Project, and the Center for Constitutional Rights, filed the amended habeas petition on Quintero’s behalf.

“He’s a loving person, responsible and hardworking,” the family member added. “I often wonder if he’s eaten yet, what he’s eaten, or how he’s feeling. This is affecting me emotionally and physically and I can’t rest. Edicson was terrified of remaining stuck in immigration detention in the U.S. or Guantanamo, but imprisonment at CECOT is worse than anything we could have imagined.”

Quintero has been in U.S. government custody for nearly a year.

After arriving at the border in April last year, he turned himself in to immigration officers, according to the court filing. Those officers released him into the United States with an ankle monitor and instructions on how to check in with Immigration and Custom Enforcement officials, the filing said. Quintero did as he was told, but he was taken into custody in June nonetheless.

During a July bond hearing, the government “alleged, but did not prove” that he was a member of the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua. The Trump administration has claimed, without evidence, that many of the men it sent to CECOT are affiliated with that gang.

The filing noted that Quintero is believed to have never been charged or convicted of any crime, anywhere. “On information and belief, Mr. Quintero has no connection whatsoever with Tren de Aragua,” the filing said.

In September, an immigration judge ordered him removed to Venezuela ― not on the grounds of any alleged gang membership, but for a simple immigration violation.

Quintero sat for months in U.S. immigration detention. Finally, in February, he filed a habeas corpus petition on his own behalf, seeking release from custody. Quintero wrote that he “was not fighting [his] case anymore,” and that he “just wanted to go home,” according to the new filing.

Quintero, wrote in his February petition that he expected to continue to be detained in the United States because Venezuela was “not taking deportations” from the country ― a fact that has more or less remained true, with a few exceptions. Wednesday’s filing noted that Quintero’s petition from earlier this year “was an obvious assertion of the well-established statutory and constitutional claims articulated in Zadvydas v. Davis,” which states “that after six months of post-removal order detention, release is required if there is not a ‘significant likelihood of removal in the reasonably foreseeable future.’”

But the Trump administration sought to circumvent this legal requirement for release, according to the filing, by sending Quintero to El Salvador.

By March 10, Quintero had reached six months in U.S. detention (on top of three additional months behind bars before he’d received a final removal order), triggering Zadvydas.

But by then, the government had shuttled him from a detention center in Georgia to one in El Paso. On March 15, lawyers wrote, “rather than releasing Mr. Quintero or at least responding to the [habeas corpus] petition on its merits, the government took the extraordinary step of transferring Mr. Quintero to CECOT.”

Notably, unlike other detainees sent to CECOT, the Trump administration does not consider Quintero an “alien enemy.” The administration has said that around half of the over 250 men sent to CECOT were covered by the Alien Enemies Act, a rarely used 18th century law under which President Donald Trump is likening alleged gang members to an invading army.

But the other half were shipped to the prison camp as part of the standard deportation process. A federal judge in Boston has paused these so-called “third-country” removals for now if detainees aren’t given a chance to make the case that they fear removal to a certain country.

Separately, the Trump administration has so far refused to meaningfully comply with a Supreme Court order that it “facilitate” the return of Kilmar Abrego Garciato the United States, a Salvadoran man who a court had previously ordered should not be sent to the country, but who was anyway in what the administration claims was a mistake.

On Wednesday, lawyers for Quintero argued that the United States should be required to facilitate his return to the U.S. or his removal to Venezuela. But keeping him in CECOT, they said, was “lawless.”

“There is no statutory authority that could possibly justify his continued custody under or by color of the authority of the U.S. government, let alone at CECOT,” the lawyers wrote.

What’s more, Quintero’s attorneys alleged he was never given notice that he was being sent to El Salvador, and therefore wasn’t available to make a case that he feared torture or persecution there.

Only after Quintero was sent to CECOT, government lawyers moved to dismiss his first habeas petition, writing that he was “no longer” in ICE custody. They now claim that he has been “removed,” according to Wednesday’s filing.

“Respondents transferred him to CECOT to evade review of his claim under Zadvydas,” Wednesday’s filing alleged.

Still, Quintero’s case ― and those of hundreds of others currently locked up in CECOT thanks to a U.S. agreement with El Salvador ― carry stunning legal implications.

As Wednesday’s filing states: “No statute authorizes extraterritorial immigration detention or immigration detention pursuant to an agreement with a foreign nation.” It adds that no statute “authorizes Respondents to detain a noncitizen after they have been removed,” and that “Respondents lack any statutory or constitutional authority to detain Mr. Quintero at CECOT.”

The Venezuelan man’s ongoing detention in torturous prison conditions also contains a brutal irony.

When Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem visited CECOT recently, she used it as a propaganda tool, releasing a video with the caption: “President Trump and I have a clear message to criminal illegal aliens: LEAVE NOW. If you do not leave, we will hunt you down, arrest you, and you could end up in this El Salvadorian prison.”

Quintero’s lawyers say he had done just that: He asked to be released from custody, and even said he was willing to “go home” to Venezuela, but still was sent to the Salvadoran prison.