An 86-year-old French woman who moved to the US to marry her 1950s sweetheart is being held in a crowded detention centre in Louisiana after she was arrested by immigration agents and cuffed by her hands and feet.
- +French woman, 86, held by ICE after moving to US to marry 1950s sweetheart
The family of the woman, named only as Marie-Thérèse, said they feared for her health as French consular officials attempted to secure her release.
The family of the woman, named only as Marie-Thérèse, said they feared for her health as French consular officials attempted to secure her release. One of her sons told the Ouest-France newspaper that Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) had treated his mother like a hardened criminal.
“For us it’s urgent to get her out of the detention centre and bring her back to France,” he said. “Given her health, she won’t last a month in such conditions of detention.”
He said he, his brother and sister heard no news about their mother for a week after she was arrested until French consular officials were allowed to visit her. She had heart and back problems, and they had been told she was being held with 70 other detainees.
Marie-Thérèse, from Brittany, moved to the US last year after rekindling her romance with Billy, a former US serviceman she fell in love with while working as a bilingual secretary at a Nato base near France’s Atlantic port of Saint-Nazaire in the 1950s. The couple were separated when he returned to the US in 1966 after Charles de Gaulle, France’s president, decided to withdraw from Nato’s integrated military command structure.
In 2010 the pair, then both married to other people, reconnected via social media and the two couples met. In April 2025, after their respective partners had died, Marie-Thérèse announced she was moving to Anniston, Alabama, to marry her former love. Her son said Billy, a retired colonel and helicopter pilot in the US army, was “a charming, adorable man. They were like a couple of teenagers.”
However, when Billy died in January 2026, Marie-Thérèse had not yet obtained a green card allowing her to remain in the US, leaving her status unclear. She then found herself in a dispute with one of her late husband’s sons, who allegedly cut off water, electricity and internet at her home. She had engaged a lawyer to fight the case but on 1 April, eight days before it was due to be heard at the local tribunal, ICE agents turned up to arrest her.
“The neighbours went to the court for the hearing and said our mother would have won,” her son said. “She’s holding up. Our mother’s a fighter; a force of nature. The others being held call her unsinkable.”
He added: “It’s like a bad scene from an American film. Every morning, I wake saying it can’t be true, that I’ve had a nightmare.”
Relations between Paris and Washington are tense. Emmanuel Macron, the French president, has criticised Donald Trump’s stance on Iran, saying it would be “unrealistic” to attempt to open the strait of Hormuz by force.
