An 86-year-old French woman who had moved to the U.S. to rekindle a decades-old romance has been detained by immigration officials, her family said.
The woman, identified as Marie-Therese Helene Ross, is currently being held at a crowded detention center in Louisiana following her arrest, the family claimed. She moved to America last year to marry an old sweetheart from the 1950s.
“For us it’s urgent to get her out of the detention center and bring her back to France,” one of her sons told Ouest-France newspaper, adding that the family was desperate to return his mother to France. “Given her health, she won’t last a month in such conditions of detention.”
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.”
In a statement shared with The Independent, a spokesperson for the Department of Homeland Security said: “On April 1, ICE arrested Marie-Therese Helene Ross, an illegal alien from France.
“She last entered the country in June 2025 under the Visa Waiver Program, which permitted her to remain in the country for 90 days. Seven months later, she is still illegally in the United States.”
The spokesperson added: “We encourage all illegal aliens to take control of their departure with the CBP Home App. The United States is offering illegal aliens $2,600 and a free flight to self-deport now. We encourage every person here illegally to take advantage of this offer and reserve the chance to come back to the U.S. the right legal way to live the American dream. If not, you will be arrested and deported without a chance to return.”
Marie-Therese’s son said that neither he nor his siblings had been given any updates for a week following her arrest last month, and had only received news after she had been visited by French consular officials.
The octogenarian, who reportedly has heart and back problems, is being held in the center with around 70 other detainees.
According to her family, Marie-Thérèse moved from Brittany to Anniston, Alabama, last year to pursue a romance with a former U.S. serviceman named Billy, whom she had met and fallen in love with in the 1950s at a NATO military base in the port of Saint-Nazaire on the west coast of France.
The pair were separate in 1966, when Billy returned to the U.S. and French president Charles de Gaulle withdrew the nation from NATO’s integrated military command structure.
Both went on to marry other people, but reconnected in 2010 via social media and later met up as couples. However, Marie-Therese announced her intention to move to the U.S. in April last year, when their respective partners had both died.
Her son said the pair had been “like a couple of teenagers.”
However, when Billy died in January, Marie Therese had not obtained a green card that would allow her to stay in the country. She then reportedly had legal troubles with one of Billy’s sons who allegedly cut off water and electricity to her home, The Guardian reported.
She had been due to go to court to resolve the dispute on April 1, but was detained by immigration officials a week before.
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