ICE Has an 86-Year-Old French Woman in Detention, Months After Her Husband’s Death
Marie-Thérèse was reportedly waiting for a green card when her husband died. Now she's in ICE's hands.
Photo via Unsplash, yasmin peyman Splinter ICE
The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) like to bang on about President Donald Trump’s ongoing mass-deportation campaign being focused on targeting what they frequently refer to as “the worst of the worst” of the illegal immigrant population, casting a lack of immigration status as an offense tantamount to rape and murder in the eyes of the federal government. Meanwhile, back in reality, the ICE net is cast wide and indiscriminately dredges up anything that happens to fall into it as agents pursue arbitrary quotas of just how many lives they’re supposed to upend in any given month. The agency continues to clumsily plow forward to meet these quotas, even in cases where the tiniest bit of critical thinking might save ICE from even more obvious PR disasters. Because really, what else would explain why ICE would take the time to arrest an 86-year-old French widow of an American soldier, in the process of waiting for her green card, and leave that infirm woman rotting in detention as if she’s some kind of flight risk or criminal mastermind? Rarely does a day pass when ICE doesn’t find a way to score one of these types of own goals.
The woman in question is a French national named Marie-Thérèse. She’s a native of Brittany, and had traveled to the U.S. in 2025 for the most Hallmark Channel-appropriate of reasons: To marry her long-lost American love from the 1960s. After her arrest, family back in France had flown into a panic, saying that they heard nothing from her for a week until French consular officials were able to finally make contact. Her family says Marie-Thérèse suffers from heart and back problems, but is being held by ICE regardless with 70 other detainees in a Louisiana detention center–the kind of disregard that resulted in record high detainee deaths in 2025. Agents reportedly had the audacity to cuff her hands and feet as they took her away, and family members urgently want to see her either immediately released or returned to France. As one of her sons told The Guardian: “For us it’s urgent to get her out of the detention center and bring her back to France. Given her health, she won’t last a month in such conditions of detention.”
What a nightmare.
— Aaron Reichlin-Melnick (@reichlinmelnick.bsky.social) Apr 14, 2026 at 7:58 PM
Leave it to ICE to find a way to get involved in what would otherwise be an old-fashioned love story, albeit with a side of inheritance-based recrimination. Marie-Thérèse reportedly met her husband, a retired colonel and helicopter pilot oddly referred to only as “Billy” in reporting from The Guardian and BBC, when the latter was stationed in France at a NATO base in the coastal town of Saint-Nazaire, where she was a secretary. The two fell in love, but were separated in 1966 when Billy was forced to return to the United States following French President Charles de Gaulle withdrawing the country from NATO’s integrated military command structure. The two fell out of contact for decades and both married other people, each having children. They reconnected in the 2010s, however, and following the death of both their spouses a decade later the two widowed seniors rekindled their relationship in the early 2020s. By 2025, Marie-Thérèse had decided to move to the United States in her mid-80s to marry once more, with her son saying the two were giddily in love “like teenagers” all over again. Tragedy struck, however, in January of this year when Billy suddenly passed away, leaving Marie-Thérèse with a pending green card application that had not yet been processed.
Things might have still worked out alright, if not for what the BBC refers to as “a dispute over his inheritance” that soon cropped up between Marie-Thérèse and Billy’s son from the previous marriage, who according to Marie-Thérèse’s son “threatened her, intimidated her, and even went so far as to cut off her water, internet and electricity.” Marie-Thérèse lawyered up, but days before a scheduled hearing ICE instead showed up at her front door, taking her into custody on the pretext that her entry under the U.S. Visa Waiver Program had expired. As the BBC goes out of its way to observe: “There is no proof that it was a report by Billy’s son that landed his stepmother in an ICE detention center.” Mhm, mhm.
It’s unclear, meanwhile, whether Marie-Thérèse and her presumably U.S.-based lawyer would be fighting against deportation, or whether she is indeed trying to get back to France and her family there. The only thing that is certain is that she remains in detention, and that all of this process could easily have been handled without dragging an 86-year-old woman with heart problems into an ICE concentration camp. Or as the son of Marie-Thérèse put it to The Guardian: “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.”
Deaths in ICE Custody Are Growing. ‘They Let Him Rot in There.’ www.nytimes.com/2026/03/29/u…
As immigrant detainee deaths have increased, conditions in detention facilities nationwide are coming under more scrutiny. #Pinks 🎁
— Jules⚖️ (@northjules.bsky.social) Mar 29, 2026 at 7:59 AM
Ask yourself: Even in an immigration system during the second Trump administration that is quite clearly built to be punitive and intimidating, what is the point of subjecting an old woman–the widow of an American soldier, no less–to this rigmarole? Is there not a single person at DHS who understands that these types of stories have damaged ICE’s support even with American conservatives? Imagine if ICE was more competent and calculating in inflicting this kind of pain; how many more Americans they could probably have on their side if they were exclusively targeting cases less obviously sympathetic than “ancient widow.” I suppose we should be thankful that the leadership of DHS has been as purely incompetent as they are misanthropic, which has been a factor in driving public sentiment about ICE off a cliff since the beginning of 2026. That there is anyone left not calling for the abolishment of the agency, however, demonstrates just how deep the rot still goes.
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