An 86-year-old American woman is being threatened with deportation from the Netherlands even though she needs the constant care of her family in the Netherlands, the Telegraaf reports on Monday.

The paper says Dorothy Murphy weighed just 51 kilos when her daughter picked her up in New York last September and brought her back to Almere because she could no longer cope with living on her own.

However, the justice ministry has written to Dorothy to say she can be deported from May 18 because ‘there is no question of a more than usual dependency between you and your daughter’.

Her son-in-law Rob Verhoeven told the Telegraaf the decision to deport her is ‘scandalous’. ‘We are very worried,’ he said. ‘She is not costing the Netherlands any money and there is no one to help her in New York’.

‘I really don’t understand how the government can take such a decision,’ he said.