He spied for the U.S. in the war on terror. Now ICE wants to deport him.

The Trump administration is trying to deport a self-described CIA spy who infiltrated al Qaeda after 9/11 and won his permission to live in the U.S. by helping convict terrorists.

Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents arrested Blerim Skoro, a Kosovo-born father of three, outside an immigration office in New Jersey where he was renewing his paperwork earlier this month.

His lawyers have filed in federal court to halt his deportation, saying Skoro, 55, was promised residency after years of significant work as a "CIA agent."

Skoro, a Staten Island, New York, cab driver who has an American wife and children, was granted a deferral of removal in 2022 due to the risk of his capture and torture by terrorists if he were deported.

The ruling was due in part to Skoro's help securing the arrests of al Qaeda, al Shabaab and Hezbollah members, his lawyers claim.

Now he fears that the government, for which he claims to have put his life on the line, is going to send him back to Kosovo — he says into the hands of those who want him dead.

"I never thought they were going to betray me like this," he told CBS News in a phone interview from Elizabeth Detention Center, in New Jersey. "Please, if I die, I should die in this country so my kids can bury me."

Skoro's relationship with U.S. intelligence officials began when he was jailed for trafficking drugs in 2000, FBI documents show.

He says he was struggling to make ends meet supporting his children and refugee parents after the family fled the Kosovo conflict in the 1990s. He got caught transporting heroin overseas for an Albanian criminal gang.

Raised a Muslim, he was welcomed by a group of Islamic radicals in a Manhattan prison where he began serving his drug trafficking sentence, FBI files that list him as a confidential informant show. After 9/11, he says the CIA approached him to exploit the connection.

While incarcerated at FCI Allenwood, a federal prison in Pennsylvania, between 2002 and 2006, Skoro says he gleaned intelligence for the FBI on terrorists including Faysal Galab of the Lackawanna Six , which federal agents described as America's first homegrown terrorist sleeper cell; Randall "Ismail" Royer of the Virginia jihad network, convicted of organizing violence against U.S. troops overseas; and Hezbollah member Junuz Fuaz.

Heavily redacted FBI records from 2004 obtained by CBS News list Skoro as an informant in an investigation targeting Osama bin Laden, at times providing "actionable" and "reliable" information including details of a "Syrian training camp."

Skoro believed he would receive a reduced sentence for his work, but was instead deported to Kosovo in 2007 and claims he was told by the CIA to infiltrate al Qaeda from the Balkans — only returning to the U.S. in 2014, he said in a previous legal declaration for his immigration case.

Skoro claims he was undercover in the terrorist group from 2007 to 2009 for the CIA, traveling to an ISIS camp in Syria and working in Lebanon, Jordan, Pakistan and Egypt as well as his home country.