France has granted safe haven to an anti-Kremlin Russian activist couple detained by ICE in the United States, but his wife was nowhere to be found after he landed in Paris on Monday. After France issued the couple humanitarian visas to avoid them being deported to Russia, Alexei Ishimov, 31, arrived in Paris from Seattle on Monday morning, AFP correspondents saw.
His 29-year-old wife Nadezhda, a former volunteer for the late opposition leader Alexei Navalny, was expected to arrive on a separate flight from Miami, also on Monday morning.
But she did not show up at the Paris Charles de Gaulle Airport as planned.
“I am in shock,” a visibly distressed Alexei, who had not seen his wife for more than 20 months, told AFP at the airport.
The couple were both swept up in US President Donald Trump’s immigration crackdown, and had been held by the country’s ICE agency that is leading a crackdown on immigration.
Olga Prokopieva, head of the Paris-based association Russie-Libertes, which has been assisting the young couple, said Nadezhda was not allowed on the flight because she had a temporary travel document called a laissez-passer instead of a passport.
Russie-Libertes and the Russian Antiwar Committee hope that Nadezhda will be allowed to travel to France soon.
The couple left Russia in 2022 as the Kremlin ramped up a crackdown on opponents following the invasion of Ukraine.
The couple eventually flew to Mexico and entered the United States in 2024. They were detained by US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and sent to different detention centres as part of Trump’s immigration crackdown.
Alexei had spent nine months in detention in California and later in the state of Washington. In January 2025, he was released with an ankle bracelet.
– ‘More than a hundred countries’ –
Nadezhda has been kept at the South Louisiana ICE Processing Center for around 21 months.
To avoid deportation to Russia, Alexei had contacted numerous countries.
“Starting from May 2025, I wrote letters to more than a hundred countries asking for help, and essentially no one responded except France,” he said.
He said that French diplomats were “constantly in touch.”
They “worked very closely with ICE representatives, contacted me regularly, and did everything possible to help us obtain a lawful path to safety and reunification,” he said.
“It is hard for me to find the words to express the gratitude we feel,” he added.
Tens of thousands of Russians have applied for political asylum in the United States since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022. Many detainees have been subjected to arbitrary detention and not given a fair chance to defend themselves in court.
About 1,000 Russians, many of them asylum seekers, have been deported back to Russia from the United States since 2022. Some deportees were arrested on arrival.
Dmitry Valuev, head of the Russian America for Democracy in Russia (RADR) group which has followed the couple’s case, said that a US judge had ordered that Nadezhda be deported to Russia. But activists hope she’ll be allowed to fly to France.
Alexei said he would feel at ease only when he sees his wife.
“We are very tired: it has been almost two years of constant stress and pain, and separation is especially hard when you have no idea when it will end.”
