Marie-Thérèse, 86, moved from France to the US to marry her 1950s sweetheart, but instead is being held in a crowded ICE detention center in Louisiana. The French woman’s family is concerned over her health after she was arrested by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents, who cuffed her hands and feet before taking her into custody.
French consular officials are attempting to secure the woman’s release, named only as Marie-Thérèse. This is due to her family’s concerns over her health after one of her sons told the Ouest-France newspaper that the ICE agents had treated his mother like a hardened criminal.
“For us, it’s urgent to get her out of the detention centre and bring her back to France,” he said. “Given her health, she won’t last a month in such conditions of detention.”
𝐁𝐎𝐘𝐂𝐎𝐓𝐓 𝐓𝐑𝐔𝐌𝐏’𝐒 𝐔𝐒 !
An 86 yr old French woman shackled by the ankles, handcuffed, thrown into a Louisiana gaol by Trump’s ICE thugs. She’d gone only last year to the US to finally marry the love of her life, who she met in France in the 50s – but he died in… pic.twitter.com/Do9eg1EX3Z
— Alex Taylor (@AlexTaylorNews) April 12, 2026
The unnamed son said that he, his brother and sister had received no news about their mother for a week after her arrest, until French consular officials were able to visit her. According to her family, Marie-Thérèse has heart and back problems, and they were told she was being held with 70 other detainees.
From Brittany in France, Marie-Thérèse moved to the US after she had rekindled her romance with Billy, a former US serviceman. She had fallen in love with him while working as a bilingual secretary at a NATO base close to the Atlantic port of Saint-Nazaire in the 1950s.
As reported by the Independent, Marie-Thérèse and Billy were separated after he returned to the US in 1966. Their separation followed France’s president at the time, Charles de Gaulle, deciding to withdraw from NATO’s integrated military command structure.
However, the couple never forgot and in 2010, when they were both married to other people, Marie-Thérèse and Billy reconnected via social media, and the two couples met. Meanwhile, in April 2025, after their respective partners had died, Marie-Thérèse told her family that she was moving to Anniston in Alabama, to marry her former love, Billy. According to her son, Billy is a retired colonel and helicopter pilot in the US Army. He described him as “a charming, adorable man.” They were, apparently, “like a couple of teenagers.”
Sadly, Billy passed away in January 2026, and Marie-Thérèse did not yet hold a Green Card to allow her to legally stay in the US, leaving her status unclear. Moreover, the French woman found herself in a dispute with one of her late husband’s sons, who reportedly cut off electricity, water, and internet at her home. She had already hired a lawyer to fight the case, but on April 1, eight days before the case was to be heard at the local tribunal, ICE agents turned up at her home to arrest her.
Rep. Steube: “They want ICE agents to have their ID, but they don’t want voters who vote in our nation’s elections to have ID to show they’re actual citizens of our country. The hypocrisy is beyond the pale.” pic.twitter.com/5X8xRhZpiM
— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) February 17, 2026
“The neighbors went to the court for the hearing and said our mother would have won,” her son said. “She’s holding up. Our mother’s a fighter; a force of nature. The others being held call her unsinkable.”
Marie-Thérèse’s son 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.”
Meanwhile, relations between Washington DC, and Paris are tense right now after the French president Emmanuel Macron criticized President Donald Trump and his stance on Iran. Macron had said that it would be “unrealistic” to attempt to open the strait of Hormuz by force.
