A Russian scientist, Kseniia Petrova, working at Harvard Medical School, was detained by ICE agents last month at the Boston Airport where she landed from a personal trip to France. The customs officials found frog embryos in her luggage that she did not declare because she said she did not know that she was supposed to do so. She got the embryos to study them at the request of a professor at a French lab in Paris working with Harvard.
The Harvard Crimson, the newspaper of the university, reported that after Oetrova was found at fault, her research visa was revoked and she was given the options to be either sent back to her native country Russia and be barred from re-entering the US for five years or to return to France from where she was coming and apply for a new visa.
Petrova chose France and told the agents that she feared retribution in Russia as she was arrested in Russia in 2022 for speaking against the Ukraine war. This reply made everything difficult for Petrova as the Feds detained her.
Petrova’s attorney Gregory Romanovsky said the Feds are not entirely wrong and were just doing their job but just failing to declare an object at customs is not enough ground to cancel her visa. The customs should have imposed a fine and seized the object, the attorney said.
Petrova has moved to court and filed a complaint against the cancellation of her visa. “Upon discovery [of the] the samples following a search of her luggage, and despite her attempts to explain, the CBP officer failed to pursue the statutory and regulatory process for failure to declare an article in luggage,” the complaint says. “Rather, the officer marked [Petrova’s] visa in her passport as canceled.”
“This overreach reflects broader concerns about the treatment of international scholars by US immigration authorities,” Romanovsky said.
‘Russian scientist was smuggling objects’
The Department of Homeland Security said Petrova was lawfully detained after she lied to federal officials about carrying biological substances into the country. “Messages found on her phone revealed she planned to smuggle the materials through customs without declaring them,” a DHS spokesperson said. “She knowingly broke the law and took deliberate steps to evade it.”
If she’s ultimately deported Petrova would be sent to France rather than Russia, as she holds a visa which allows her to stay in the European Union’s Schengen area for up to 90 days within a 180-day period. “She cannot return to Russia without being jailed or harmed,” Romanovsky said. “It’s going to be a suicide for her to go back.”
