Federal prosecutors confirmed in a Wednesday hearing that they aim to deport the Russian-born Harvard Medical School researcher ensnared in President Donald Trump’s war on immigration despite her fear of persecution for opposing the war in Ukraine.
The same day, newly unsealed court documents revealed the Justice Department is pursuing a felony smuggling charge against the scientist, 30-year-old Kseniia Petrova, in Massachusetts federal court.
How immigration authorities have treated Petrova — and other immigrant academics like her — threatens to chill scientific advancement throughout the U.S. as highly skilled foreigners doubt they can pursue their work in peace.
Petrova normally spends her days conducting cutting-edge research on aging using a new type of microscope. But she has been held in a Louisiana Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention center for the past three months after neglecting to declare scientific samples upon reentry to the United States from France. Her boss at Harvard had asked her to pick up the frog embryo samples from another lab when she went on a trip to Paris.
While Petrova has taken responsibility for the mistake, her attorney says that such an oversight would normally result in a mere fine.
Instead, a customs agent revoked Petrova’s J-1 visa.
On Wednesday, a federal judge in Vermont held a hearing to allow the Justice Department to argue Petrova’s detention should be handled by an immigration judge in Louisiana.
The judge, Christina Reiss, also suggested the airport border agent did not have the ability to revoke Petrova’s visa as punishment for the alleged customs violation. Reiss set a bail hearing for May 28.
Gregory Romanovsky, Petrova’s lawyer, said in a statement that he was “blindsided” by news of the criminal charge after the hearing concluded.
“The timing of Kseniia’s transfer out of ICE custody into criminal custody is especially suspect because it happened right after the judge set a bail hearing for her release,” Romanovsky said. “The charge, filed three months after the alleged customs violation, is clearly intended to make Kseniia look like a criminal to justify their efforts to deport her.”
“No matter how tough the government wants to be on immigration enforcement, they have to follow the law,” the lawyer said.
From Boston Logan airport, Petrova was transferred first to Vermont and then later to Louisiana, where the Trump administration is detaining other immigrants it wishes to deport.
She wrote about her research and her detention in an op-ed for The New York Times published Tuesday, saying she was held in one large room with around 100 other women who share six phones between them. Petrova uses one of them to listen to her best friend at Harvard play classical piano in 15-minute increments, to calm her nerves.
“When I moved to America from Russia to join a biology lab at Harvard Medical School in 2023, it felt as if I found my dream job. America was a paradise for science. Everything was flourishing,” Petrova wrote in the Times.
Because she is the only person able to analyze the images generated by the new microscope, the research her lab was doing on the process of organ aging has ground to a halt, she said. Petrova and her colleagues had hoped their work might be used to better understand a number of diseases and conditions, like Alzheimer’s.
She said she fled Russia in 2022 because she had voiced her strong opposition to the country’s invasion of Ukraine and feared arrest as Russia’s authoritarian leader Vladimir Putin cracked down on all forms of dissent.