Trump Supporter Sent to ICE Detention Camp: “I Didn’t Think These Things Existed.”
Now the 85-year-old detained woman says immigrants are treated "like dogs, not in a human way."
Photo via Unsplash, Daniel Bernard Splinter ICE
The curse of those of us who write about or follow the United States’ national political discourse is that we tend to forget what the experience of U.S. life is like for the incalculable hordes of residents who just aren’t paying particularly close attention. Suffice to say, the vast majority of people are relatively untouched by the news cycle because they just aren’t interested in news; certainly not in comparison to say, this week’s The Masked Singer reveal, or the NBA playoffs. Hot button social issues debated viciously in these online spaces, like the wanton cruelty of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detention don’t even register with these residents. Perhaps they hear a few things here and there, and shove them to the back of their mind. “That doesn’t affect me,” they might think. “I’m sure if it was that bad, someone would do something about it.”
But then that person ends up in ICE detention themselves, and they’re suddenly forced to face the very real, purely misanthropic and bureaucratic weight of it all. That’s what happened to 85-year-old French widow Marie-Thérèse Ross-Mahé in the last month. We wrote about her detention a few weeks ago, how the unfortunate octogenarian had found a rekindled love with an American military veteran she’d originally fallen for in France in the 1960s, moving to marry him in Alabama in 2025. It was the second marriage for both; a late life bloom of happiness. But when her husband passed away, Ross-Mahé found herself embroiled in inheritance disputes with his adult sons, and then ICE came calling. The frail old woman, in the process of getting her green card, was arrested for overstaying her visa, put in chains and transported to an ICE detention/prison camp in Louisiana.
“It was humiliation all the time”: Marie-Thérèse Ross-Mahé, the 85-year-old French widow living in Alabama and snatched by ICE, talks to @nytimes.com in her first interview since being deported.
— Bucks County Beacon (@buckscountybeacon.com) Apr 26, 2026 at 9:02 PM
What strikes me now, though, after reading a more recent follow-up feature on Ross-Mahé from The New York Times, is how the woman, who described herself as a longtime supporter of Donald Trump, was made to confront first hand the brutal treatment of immigrants she simply chose to ignore and assumed was not happening. Prior to her arrest, she “so admired his policy to deport illegal immigrants that she thought it should be adopted in France.” After being loaded onto buses and planes “like a potato sack” with deteriorating health, though, transported in chains, and believing she was about to die, Ross-Mahé has changed her mind about how people in detention should be treated. Imagine that! Leopards, faces, etc.
“I didn’t think these things existed,” the woman said of the ICE detention facilities where she was held. “I thought what when we arrested them, we would treat them properly. It really shocked me. They treat them like dogs, not in a human way.”
Yeah, Marie-Thérèse, a whole bunch of us in the U.S. media had been trying to tell y’all about this for some time! I’m sorry that this debacle happened to you, nor should anyone be stripped of their dignity in this way and forced to endure the misanthropic treatment of a sociopathic federal government, but how can the populace be educated about what is going on if they refuse to listen to first-hand accounts of what that treatment is like? Despite the billions of dollars it’s attempting to spend on warehouse concentration camps, ICE doesn’t have quite enough facilities for every man, woman and child in the U.S. to be locked up for two weeks to teach them this lesson in person. At some point, people will need to learn how to empathize with others before experiencing the same brutality themselves, merely by hearing or reading about it, and imagining what it would be like to endure. A radical concept, I know.
In response to Ross-Mahé’s experience, the Department of Homeland Security naturally trots out its usual statement of alternative facts on how pleasant ICE detention really is. The official DHS statement is as follows: “All detainees are provided with proper meals, quality water, blankets, medical treatment, and have opportunities to communicate with their family members and lawyers. ICE has higher detention standards than most U.S. prisons that hold actual U.S. citizens,” and is “regularly audited and inspected by external agencies.”
Except, you know, that is of course all bullshit. Deaths of detainees in custody are at record highs, and ICE has at certain points failed to issue reports on those deaths as required by law. At least one of the deaths was labeled as a homicide by a local medical examiner, with seemingly nothing being done to determine how or why that detainee was killed. ICE is holding hundreds of pregnant women in detention, breaking DHS’s own rules by doing so. Even the line about “regularly audited and inspected” is BS, as a Project on Government Oversight investigation found that even amid a massive surge in ICE detention activity in 2025, the actual number of facility inspection reports simultaneously declined by more than 36%. Far more people in detention, far more detention sites, and far fewer inspections of those sites? Seems like a great combination that couldn’t possibly result in rampant abuse.
A recent inspection of the Camp East Montana detention center at Fort Bliss revealed more than 40 violations, including improper use of force by guards and insufficient medical care for people held there.
Yet, ICE investigators still declared that the facility passed the inspection.
— ACLU (@aclu.org) Apr 13, 2026 at 12:24 PM
For Marie-Thérèse Ross-Mahé, at least, the worst of it seems to be over. After weeks in detention and amid failing health, where she told NYT that “I was waiting to die, really, I knew I was not going to make it,” she was finally sent back to France. In a fitting symbol of how little the government cares about the logistics of transporting human beings, she was forced to leave behind all of her possessions, which are presumably still sitting in the small home she shared with her American military veteran husband, if they haven’t been thrown away by the stepsons who wanted her gone. She’s just one more person who managed to intentionally avoid the reality of what is truly happening to people in ICE detention until there was absolutely no way to possibly remain ignorant. Will the rest of us wise up and take notice? Or is that only possible after spending two weeks being fairly certain that you’ll soon be dead in federal detention?
For the sake of us all, I’ll be hoping for the former.
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