A Russian scientist working at Harvard Medical School has been detained by federal immigration officials, according to her attorney who said the feds are “just doing their job.”
Kseniia Petrova is being held at a US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) facility in Louisiana after she was taken into custody at Boston Logan Airport after returning from a personal trip to France on Feb. 16.
Her research visa was revoked because she did not properly declare frog embryos she had brought back to the country, according to The Harvard Crimson.
Petrova — who was arrested in Russia in 2022 for speaking out against the Ukraine war — was given the option to be sent back to her native country and be barred from re-entering the US for five years or return to France and apply for a new visa, the student paper reported.
She chose France, but when she told a CBP officer that she feared persecution back in her home country, the agency detained her instead, according to a petition filed by her attorney, Gregory Romanovsky.
“As upset as I am with ICE, they are not at fault and are just doing their job,” her attorney, Gregory Romanovsky, told Fox News.
Petrova, a bioinformatician at the Kirschner Lab, was bringing the frog embryos back to Cambridge to study at the request of a professor at a French lab in Paris working with Harvard and was unaware that she would have to claim them at customs.
Petrova’s unintentional failure to declare an object at customs, which typically only results in officials seizing the object and a possible fine up to $500, is not enough cause for CBP to cancel her visa, Romanovsky claimed.
Petrova fled Russia after she publicly protested Russian President Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, first to Georgia and then the US in 2023.
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.”
Petrova is currently being held at Richwood Detention Facility in Louisiana in a room with over 80 other female detainees, according to her Facebook post and GoFundMe started by her friend and coworker.
She’s scheduled to appear in immigration court on May 7 in Jena, Louisiana related to her asylum case.
Romanovsky has also filed a habeas corpus petition challenging CBP’s decision to detain her. A federal hearing has been scheduled for June 9 in the District of Vermont, but he’s requested the hearing be expedited.
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