An 86-year-old French woman who had moved to the U.S. to rekindle a decades-old romance has been detained by immigration officials, her family has said.
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.
“For us it’s urgent to get her out of the detention centre and bring her back to France,” one of her sons told Ouest-France newspaper, adding that the family was desperate to return his mother to France. “Given her health, she won’t last a month in such conditions of detention.”
He 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.”
The Independent has contacted the Department of Homeland Security for comment on the reports.
Marie-Therese’s son said that neither he nor his siblings had been given any updates for a week following her arrest last month, and had only received news after she had been visited by French consular officials.
The octogenarian reportedly has heart and back problems is being held in the center with around 70 other detainees.
According to her family, Marie-Thérèse 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.
The pair were separate in 1966, when Billy returned to the U.S. and French president Charles de Gaulle withdrew the nation from NATO’s integrated military command structure.
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.
Her son said the pair had been “like a couple of teenagers.”
However, when Billy died in January, Marie Therese had not obtained a green card that would allow her to stay in the country. She then reportedly had legal troubles with one of Billy’s sons who allegedly cut off water and electricity to her home, The Guardian reported.
She had been due to go to court to resolve the dispute on April 1, but was detained by immigration officials a week before.
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