The 85-Year-Old Widow Snagged by Trump’s Immigration Crackdown

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The 85-Year-Old Widow Snagged by Trump’s Immigration Crackdown

In her first interview since being deported, Marie-Thérèse Ross-Mahé, the French widow of a former G.I., recounted her experience in ICE detention.

Credit...

Dmitry Kostyukov for The New York Times

The 85-Year-Old Widow Snagged by Trump’s Immigration Crackdown

In her first interview since being deported, Marie-Thérèse Ross-Mahé, the French widow of a former G.I., recounted her experience in ICE detention.

Credit...

Dmitry Kostyukov for The New York Times

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By

Catherine Porter

Catherine Porter interviewed Marie-Thérèse Ross-Mahé in Nantes, France, and spoke with her lawyer, children and a former neighbor.

April 25, 2026

Marie-Thérèse Ross-Mahé was in bed at home in Anniston, Ala., when she was startled awake by banging. Men had surrounded the bungalow where Ms. Ross-Mahé, a French citizen, had lived with her American husband until he died in January. They were knocking loudly on the windows and doors.

When Ms. Ross-Mahé, 85, opened the door, they pushed inside, saying they were the immigration police, she said in an interview. They handcuffed her and took her to an unmarked car before driving her to a jail cell. She was still in her bathrobe, pajamas and slippers, she said.

“I didn’t know what was happening to me really,” she told me in France this week, in her first interview since being deported after a 16-day incarceration. “It was very humiliating. My hair had not even been combed. I was just getting out of bed.”

After her arrest on April 1, Ms. Ross-Mahé was swallowed into the country’s sprawling immigration detention system, where, she said, she was chained by her wrists and ankles to other inmates and loaded onto buses and a plane “like a potato sack.” After two weeks in detention in Alabama and Louisiana, she said, she feared she might die.

Her story gives a glimpse into the opaque labyrinth of immigrant-detention sites operated by the Trump administration, where many like her see no lawyer, have no sense of where they are and understand little of why they are held or, in her case, later released. It also raises questions about how that system may be weaponized: A judge

said in a ruling

that she believed that Ms. Ross-Mahé’s stepson Tony Ross, who had been fighting with her over her late husband’s estate, instigated her arrest.

The New York Times could not independently confirm the details of her experience in detention, but it aligns with the accounts of others who have been detained in similar circumstances. Tony and his brother, Gary Ross, did not respond to requests for comment, nor did their lawyer.

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