Marie-Therese Ross is 86 years old. She is French. She is the widow of William Ross, a former captain in the United States Army, who died in January of this year. She came to Alabama to be with her husband. He died. She overstayed her 90-day visa while grieving. On April 1, ICE agents detained her. She is now being held in a federal immigration detention facility in Louisiana.

The French government has fully mobilized to secure her release. The French Consul General in New Orleans has visited her twice. French officials in Washington, Atlanta, and Paris are coordinating her case. France has contacted the Department of Homeland Security directly.

The United States government has not released her.

Marie-Therese Ross is not a public safety threat. She is not a criminal. She is an elderly widow who stayed past her visa expiration date while grieving the death of her American husband, a man who served as a captain in the U.S. Army. The civil immigration violation she committed, overstaying a tourist visa, is the kind of situation that previous administrations handled through prosecutorial discretion, humanitarian review, and common sense. Those policies were scrapped. She is one of thousands of people, including spouses of active duty soldiers and families of military veterans, who previously received greater leniency under policies that no longer exist.

There is no version of American values that requires an 86-year-old widow of a U.S. Army officer to spend weeks in a federal detention facility in Louisiana while France scrambles to ensure she has adequate food and healthcare. There is no public safety rationale for her detention. There is no enforcement priority she represents. There is only a policy that has eliminated the discretion that would have allowed any reasonable immigration officer to look at her situation and make a humane decision.

The French Consul General said it simply: given her age, we really want her to get out of this situation as soon as possible. We want to get her out of jail.

That should not require a diplomatic intervention from a foreign government. It should not require a petition. It should require nothing more than a single immigration officer exercising the kind of judgment that the administration has deliberately removed from the equation.

But since that judgment has been removed, Congress must restore it. Elderly, nonviolent individuals with no criminal record who are detained on civil immigration violations deserve an automatic humanitarian review process that does not require their country of origin to mount a diplomatic campaign to secure their release. Military spouses and the families of veterans deserve the protections that were stripped from them. And Marie-Therese Ross deserves to spend whatever time she has left as a free woman, not in a detention facility in Louisiana.

Sign this petition to demand ICE immediately release Marie-Therese Ross on humanitarian grounds, restore leniency policies protecting military spouses and veterans' family members from deportation, and establish mandatory humanitarian review and release protocols for elderly nonviolent detainees in federal immigration custody.