The stakes are very high for 30-year-old Russian national Denis Davydov, who traveled to the US legally in 2014 and overstayed his visa, requesting asylum as an HIV-positive gay man who faces persecution in his home country. After taking a trip to St. Thomas in the U.S. Virgin Islands, Davydov was detained by border and customs agents in Florida, where the Associated Press reports he's been held in a detention center now for more than a month.

Davydov had been living in San Jose, as Bay City News reports, and his story has been brought to media attention by Sergey Piskunov with RUSA LGBT, a group that represents Russian-speaking members of the LGBT community.

Davydov's attorney, Aaron Morris of the New York-based Immigration Equality,which advocates for LGBT immigrants, confirmed to the AP that Davydov has been receiving his HIV medications while in detention, but that he needs access to a specialist.

Customs and Border Protection spokesman Jaime Ruiz has declined to comment on this specific case.

Piskunov tells Bay City News, "He’s a gay man and HIV-positive. Russia is not the best place for either of those and he’s a combination of both." Piskunov spoke to Davydov and says that ICE agents were "trying really hard to find something wrong" with his documents, and put him on a plane to Miami from St. Thomas for detention.

In Russia, Piskunov says, very little regard is given to the health of HIV-positive men, or gay men in general. "They have money for war in Ukraine, Crimea, Syria — they have money for all these military expenses but they don’t have money for the medical system. And they don’t care.”

And, Piskunov adds, "I believe he’s not going to live too long" if he's deported to Russia. “We have several friends in common who passed away because of HIV consequences," Piskunov says.

News of Davydov's case comes just weeks after reports emerged of the torture of gay men in concentration camps in Chechnya, in which the New York Times reports that gay men have been starved and violently interrogated, and the actions have been characterized as a "cleansing."

Below, the last picture Davydov posted of himself on the beach in St. Thomas.