{"id":893969,"date":"2026-04-14T18:20:23","date_gmt":"2026-04-14T18:20:23","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/893969\/"},"modified":"2026-04-14T18:20:23","modified_gmt":"2026-04-14T18:20:23","slug":"86-year-old-french-woman-detained-by-ice-after-moving-to-us-to-rekindle-decades-old-romance","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/893969\/","title":{"rendered":"86-year-old French woman detained by ICE after moving to US to rekindle decades-old romance"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a data-ylk=\"elm:icon;slk:The Independent;\" href=\"https:\/\/www.independent.co.uk\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><img alt=\"The Independent\" loading=\"lazy\" width=\"271\" height=\"40\" decoding=\"async\" data-nimg=\"1\" class=\"pr-2.5 max-w-[150px] max-h-[40px] min-[601px]:max-w-[115px]\" style=\"color:transparent;max-width:auto;max-height:100%\" src=\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/03\/ae90c5b0-7c98-11ed-befe-1be805a50c91.png\"\/><\/a>Tue, 14 April 2026 at 6:04 pm UTC<img alt=\" (AFP\/Getty)\" loading=\"lazy\" width=\"1200\" height=\"800\" decoding=\"async\" data-nimg=\"1\" class=\"standard-img w-full w-full h-auto\" style=\"color:transparent\" src=\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/04\/a42936eaebc5d70689359cc1e72646a6.jpeg\"\/><\/p>\n<p> (AFP\/Getty)<\/p>\n<p>An 86-year-old French woman had moved to the U.S. to rekindle a decades-old romance was detained by immigration officials.<\/p>\n<p>The woman, named only as Marie-Therese, is currently being held at a crowded detention center in Louisiana following her arrest. She had moved to America last year to marry an old sweetheart from the 1950s.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cFor us it\u2019s urgent to get her out of the detention centre and bring her back to France,\u201d one of her sons told Ouest-France newspaper, adding that the family was desperate to return his mother to France. \u201cGiven her health, she won\u2019t last a month in such conditions of detention.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>The Independent has contacted the Department of Homeland Security for comment on the reports.<\/p>\n<p>According to her family, Marie-Th\u00e9r\u00e8se moved from Brittany to Anniston, Alabama, last year to pursue a romance with a former U.S. serviceman named Billy, who she had met and fallen in love with in the 1950s at a NATO military base in the port of Saint-Nazaire on the west coast of France.<\/p>\n<p>The pair were separate in 1966, when Billy returned to the U.S. and French president Charles de Gaulle withdrew the nation from NATO\u2019s integrated military command structure.<\/p>\n<p>Both went on to marry other people but reconnected in 2010 via social media and later met up as couples. However, Marie-Therese announced her intention to move to the U.S. in April last year, when their respective partners had both died.<\/p>\n<p>Her son said the pair had been \u201clike a couple of teenagers.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>More follows &#8230; <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Tue, 14 April 2026 at 6:04 pm UTC (AFP\/Getty) An 86-year-old French woman had moved to the U.S.&hellip;\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":893970,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5311],"tags":[252328,85549,252327,61998,49,978,659],"class_list":{"0":"post-893969","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-united-states","8":"tag-detention-center","9":"tag-immigration-officials","10":"tag-marie-therese","11":"tag-ouest-france","12":"tag-united-states","13":"tag-us","14":"tag-usa"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/116404448672476820","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/893969","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=893969"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/893969\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/893970"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=893969"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=893969"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=893969"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}