France says 85-year-old detained over inheritance dispute has returned home

Marie-Thérèse Ross-Mahé has returned to France after spending weeks in U.S. immigration custody, a case that pulled an elderly widow into the center of a family inheritance battle and a transatlantic diplomatic effort. French Foreign Minister Jean-Noël Barrot said she was back home on Friday, after French officials said they had been “fully mobilized” to secure her release.

Ross-Mahé, 85, was detained by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement in Alabama on April 1 and later held in a federal detention center in Louisiana. The Department of Homeland Security said she had overstayed a 90-day visa waiver period. Her detention drew attention not only because of her age, but because it unfolded against the backdrop of a bitter estate dispute after the death of her husband, William Ross, in January 2026.

Her path to the United States began decades earlier, when she first met Billy Ross in the 1960s while he was stationed in France near the NATO base in Saint-Nazaire, where she worked as a secretary. They reconnected through social media in 2010, began a relationship in 2022 after both had been widowed, and married in 2025, with some marriage records listing the wedding in April 2025. Ross-Mahé had applied for a green card, but it had not yet been issued when she was detained.

The case raised sharp concerns about how immigration detention intersects with age, illness and private legal conflict. Ross-Mahé’s family said she had heart and back problems, and her son said she was “handcuffed and shackled like a dangerous criminal.” He also said the experience felt “like something out of a bad American movie.” Reports said she was held with about 70 other detainees in the Louisiana facility, underscoring the crowded, impersonal setting in which her health needs and legal status collided.

French officials tried to keep a line open to the detention center and to her family. Rodolphe Sambou, France’s consul general in New Orleans, said he had visited her twice and was working to make sure she had enough food and health care. The French consulate also stayed in close contact with U.S. immigration authorities as the case moved through the diplomatic channel.

An Alabama probate judge reportedly believed Ross’s stepsons were responsible for the sequence of events that led to her arrest, tying the immigration case to an inheritance dispute that spilled far beyond the family. Her return home ends the immediate detention, but it does not erase the larger question the case raised: how a vulnerable 85-year-old widow, waiting on immigration paperwork and caught in a private legal fight, ended up in custody at all.