France presses US to release 86-year-old widow detained by ICE

An 86-year-old French widow who came to the United States to reunite with the man she first met at a NATO base near Nantes was detained by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement in Alabama and then moved to a federal immigration facility in Louisiana after officials said she overstayed a 90-day visa waiver by about seven months.

Marie-Thérèse Ross married Alabama resident William Ross in April 2025 and traveled to the United States in June 2025 to join him. William Ross, a former U.S. Army captain, died in January 2026, leaving her in the country as a widow at the center of an immigration case that has drawn attention far beyond Alabama and Louisiana.

French officials said they were pressing the U.S. Department of Homeland Security for her release. Rodolphe Sambou, the French consul general in New Orleans, said he had visited Ross twice in detention and had been coordinating with officials in Washington, Atlanta and Paris. Sambou said France had "fully mobilized" because of her age and wanted to make sure she had enough food and health care.

ICE publicly confirmed Ross’s detention and described her as an undocumented foreigner who had overstayed her tourist stay permit by seven months. The case has sharpened scrutiny of how the agency handles elderly people whose immigration problems are bureaucratic rather than criminal, and how much discretion ICE uses when someone’s family ties, age and health make detention especially harsh.

The episode has also become part of wider criticism of the Trump administration’s mass-deportation campaign, including the detention of spouses of U.S. soldiers and military veterans who had previously been treated more leniently under policies now scrapped. In Ross’s case, the question is not only whether she missed a deadline, but whether an 86-year-old widow in mourning should have been placed in detention at all, then kept there while diplomats scrambled across three countries to win her release.