ICE detains 86-year-old French woman three months after her American husband died
The woman had married her childhood sweetheart last April and was in the process of obtaining her residency permit
The story of 86-year-old Frenchwoman Marie-Thérèse Ross is extraordinary. It began with an American pilot; a childhood sweetheart whom she married a year ago, 60 years after meeting him. Now, however, things have taken a turn for the worse, as the elderly woman finds herself in an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detention center, three months after becoming a widow.
She was arrested on April 1 when agents raided her home in Anniston, Alabama, where she lived with her husband. Authorities believe she is in the country illegally because she did not have a green card, the permanent residency permit, which was still being processed. Ross, originally from a town near Nantes in southern France, is being held in a detention center in Louisiana along with 70 other detainees, according to her family.
“It seems like a script from an American movie. Every morning I wake up saying this can’t be real,” her son — who prefers to remain anonymous — told the French newspaper Ouest France. He recounted to the paper the violent conditions under which his mother was arrested, despite her age and the fact that she posed no danger: “She was handcuffed and shackled like a dangerous criminal,” he lamented.
He and his two siblings were alerted to their mother’s arrest by neighbors. The woman was held incommunicado for several days until French consular services were able to contact her, visit her, and inform her family. According to diplomatic sources speaking to EL PAÍS, the French consulate in New Orleans “is closely monitoring Ms. Ross’s situation, and she has been able to immediately benefit from consular protection.”
The consulate “is in contact with her family and is maintaining close communication with U.S. ICE authorities,” these sources say, declining to provide personal details about the circumstances of the woman’s arrest or the reasons for it. The French Ministry of Foreign Affairs is working to secure her release and repatriation as soon as possible.
Marie-Thérèse Ross had married a former colonel and pilot in the U.S. Army the previous year. She had met him in the late 1950s in Montoir-de-Bretagne, very close to the NATO base in Saint-Nazaire, where he was based and she worked as a secretary. He returned to the U.S., and many years later, in 2010, both married, they reconnected. The two couples saw each other occasionally. Later, both were widowed and began a relationship, traveling back and forth between France and the United States. A year ago, she decided to move to Alabama, where she applied for a permanent residency card.
They married in April 2025. Her husband passed away last January. According to her son, Marie-Thérèse had planned to return to France at the end of this month, but she stayed in the U.S. to settle her inheritance paperwork first. He claims that her husband’s son “threatened her to the point of cutting off her electricity and water.” “It’s urgent to get her out of the detention center and bring her to France,” explains the son, who notes that his mother suffers from heart problems and is in fragile health. “She won’t be able to endure those conditions.”
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