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.<\/p>\n
The family of the woman, named only as Marie-Th\u00e9r\u00e8se, 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.<\/p>\n
\u201cFor us it\u2019s urgent to get her out of the detention centre and bring her back to France,\u201d he said. \u201cGiven her health, she won\u2019t last a month in such conditions of detention.\u201d<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
Marie-Th\u00e9r\u00e8se, 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\u2019s 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\u2019s president, decided to withdraw from Nato\u2019s integrated military command structure.<\/p>\n
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-Th\u00e9r\u00e8se 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 \u201ca charming, adorable man. They were like a couple of teenagers.\u201d<\/p>\n
However, when Billy died in January 2026, Marie-Th\u00e9r\u00e8se 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\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe neighbours went to the court for the hearing and said our mother would have won,\u201d her son said. \u201cShe\u2019s holding up. Our mother\u2019s a fighter; a force of nature. The others being held call her unsinkable.\u201d<\/p>\n
He added: \u201cIt\u2019s like a bad scene from an American film. Every morning, I wake saying it can\u2019t be true, that I\u2019ve had a nightmare.\u201d<\/p>\n
Relations between Paris and Washington are tense. Emmanuel Macron, the French president, has criticised Donald Trump\u2019s stance on Iran, saying it would be \u201cunrealistic\u201d to attempt to open the strait of Hormuz by force.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"An 86-year-old French woman who moved to the US to marry her 1950s sweetheart is being held in…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":530827,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[49,50,51,47,52,48],"class_list":["post-530826","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-headlines","tag-headlines","tag-news","tag-top-news","tag-top-stories","tag-topnews","tag-topstories"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/530826","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=530826"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/530826\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/530827"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=530826"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=530826"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=530826"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}