A Bronx man who's been in Immigration and Customs Enforcement custody for two-and-a-half years may have a new chance at being reunited with his wife and toddler while he and his lawyers fight a deportation order against him.

Ousman Darboe, a Fordham Heights resident who turns 26 this week, was pardoned for a third degree robbery this month by Governor Andrew Cuomo—a conviction that Darboe accepted as part of a plea deal, despite maintaining his innocence.

Darboe's lawyers hope the pardon could prevent his deportation altogether, which is currently pending in the Second Circuit Court of Appeals.

"It was amazing," Sophia Gurulé, one of the lawyers working on Darboe's case, said of the pardon Cuomo issued February 3rd. "The fact that Governor Cuomo was able to understand that and see the humanity in Ousman and his entire family and his wife and his child, to see that their lives matter."

Darboe moved to the U.S. from Gambia with his family on a tourist visa when he was age 6, in 2001. In July 2017, ICE moved to deport him, months after he took a plea deal for the 2014 robbery of two gold chain necklaces.

In an emailed statement, ICE said he had "failed to leave in the required timeframe" on his "nonimmigrant visa," which he was issued as a child.

He has been in ICE's custody since July 31, 2017, spending 30 months behind bars, about a year-and-a-half longer than his sentence. Since September 2018, he has been in Bergen County Jail, where contact visits are prohibited, preventing him from holding his two-year-old daughter, said Gurulé.

"We need him. He's a part of us," Darboe's wife, Lashalle Darboe, told News 12. "He's our family, and he's been taken away from us."

Darboe had various run-ins with police in his late teens and early twenties. At 16, he was accused of stealing headphones in high-school in a case that was later dismissed, according to Vox, which detailed his case in a feature last fall. Vox wrote last September:

In October 2010, four months after being falsely accused of stealing the headphones, Darboe was fingered for stealing a purse and was adjudicated as a youthful offender. When asked in court why he stole it, Darboe said that he didn’t have any school supplies, or a book bag, and he couldn’t ask his parents because he knew they didn’t have the money. “I felt, I felt bad because I felt like I had to take [a] drastic measure to get the stuff that I needed,” he said.

The series of arrests and charges against him ultimately led to the single conviction that Cuomo has now pardoned.

Darboe's lawyers see the pardon as a new opportunity for his family reunification. He's received hundreds of signatures from supporters.

"It gives him a very real opportunity to fight for his family reunification, to get out of ICE custody, to return to his wife—his high-school sweetheart—to his daughter," Gurulé said. "It's just a completely new factor in his case that didn't exist."

In a memo to a federal judge filed on Friday, his lawyers wrote: "In light of these extraordinary circumstances—where the Government's justification for 30 months of detention no longer exists, and where [Darboe] and his family are suffering daily harm as a result of that unjustified detention—we write to respectfully request" his release.

"Our justice system is based on the concepts of redemption and rehabilitation," Cuomo's senior advisor Rich Azzopardi said in an emailed statement. "Mr. Darboe served his sentence and a federal government carrying out a politicized deportation policy is not acting in the interest of justice."

Darboe's case comes amid increased tensions between the Trump administration's ICE and the city. Days after Cuomo pardoned Darboe, an ICE officer attempting to arrest a man shot another man in the face during an altercation that left both men in the hospital and in ICE custody. The shooting led to protests at the hospital where the two men were treated.