UPDATE: The Trump administration's failed frog march
A federal judge says it's time to free a Russian-born scientist facing deportation over a batch of harmless scientific samples
By Sam Bellamy
The Trump administration’s valiant effort to protect us from frog embryos shamelessly smuggled into this country by a Russian-born research scientist at Harvard appears to have croaked.
On Wednesday, a U.S. District Court judge in Vermont said she’d grant bail to Kseniia Petrova, a 30-year-old scientist whose bizarre case is detailed in the piece below.
Judge Christina Reiss said there “does not seem to be either a factual or legal basis for the immigration officer’s actions” to revoke Petrova’s student visa at Boston’s Logan Airport in February.
Petrova was detained at customs — and quickly routed to a jail in Louisiana as a prelude to deportation — for failing to declare that she had samples of frog embroyos in her luggage. She was arrested and faces felony smuggling charges that ordinarily result in a small fine and a stern warning.
The young scientist, who had been on vacation in France, was asked by a supervisor at Harvard Medical School to bring the embryos from a research facility in Paris because they’d been sliced in such a way that they would accelerate Petrova’s research into cancer and the aging process.
The situation was not as sinister as ICE agents have made it appear, according to Judge Reiss, who noted that the scientific samples were “wholly non-hazardous, non-toxic, non-living, and posed a threat to no one.”
It appears Petrova skipped the paperwork for declaring the samples because she misunderstood the rules or, in the most devious interpretation, simply feared a delay at customs for an inspection would lead to the samples spoiling.
The deportation process immediately started against her was curiously zealous, even for an administration unhinged by the thought of foreign people, especially brown ones, scurrying around, doing heaven knows what while good white people sleep.
The fact that Petrova is Russian, not Latino or from another targeted ethnicity, raised suspicions that none other than Vladimir Putin was behind her detention. She was a star student in Russia, after all, and she had protested Putin’s invasion of Ukraine. (Well, if you believe Volodymyr Zelensky’s version of events; Trump has informed us that Ukraine started it.)
Bail is just the first step to Petrova returning to work. Judge Reiss deserves praise for doing the right thing and ordering her freed, as do others in the judiciary who’ve stood up for the rule of law against the administration’s ruthless assault on immigrants.
Trump claimed his roundup of immigrants would focus on violent criminals. Petrova is no such thing. Let her return to Harvard to continue her research.
The following piece, “Why is the Trump administration hellbent on deporting young Harvard scientist?/The case against a Russian-born researcher is a curious one and needs greater attention,” was appeared April 23 at Fight the Fire.
By Sam Bellamy
Amid the many careless and callous deportation cases in the news lately, there’s the rather curious story of 30-year-old Kseniia Petrova, a Russian-born scientist at Harvard Medical School.
Petrova has been held in an ICE detention facility in Louisiana since February, facing deportation on allegations that – prepare to gasp – she failed to properly declare samples of frog embryos in her suitcase on a return trip from France.
Customs and Border Protection first detained her at Logan International Airport in Boston, where she had landed following a short vacation. She later told reporters that a CBP officer examined her J-1 scholar visa sponsored by Harvard, stamped her passport and waved her through.
New York Times reporter Ellen Barry describes what happened next: “… as she headed toward the baggage claim, a Border Patrol officer approached her and asked to search her suitcase. All she could think was that the embryo samples inside would be ruined; RNA degrades easily. She explained that she didn’t know the rules. The officer was polite, she recalled, and told her she would be allowed to leave.”
But a second officer approached, and Petrova says the tone of the conversation quickly changed. The officer asked her questions about the embryos, then told her that her visa was being revoked and asked if she would be afraid of being deported to Russia.
Indeed, she would be – and told the officer so. As a teenager, Petrova had participated in peaceful protests against Vladimir Putin’s regime and, in 2022, was arrested and fined $200 for participating in a peaceful protest against Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
It was shortly after that invasion, as Putin renewed a crackdown on independent news sources, that she recognized she would have to flee if she wanted to continue her promising career as a scientist. “I changed my decision from ‘I will never leave Russia’ to ‘I am leaving Russia immediately,’” she told The Times via a video link at the detention center.
Harvard’s Kirschner Laboratory was delighted to take her in, according to Leon Peshkin, a principal research scientist in the university’s department of systems biology.
Dr. Peshkin blames himself for what’s happened, although, of course, the person ultimately at fault here is Donald Trump, whose malicious roundup of immigrants has gone far, far beyond its stated intent of capturing violent criminals who are here illegally.
Petrova’s short vacation in France to attend a concert and catch up with old friends, including fellow Russian exiles, was a pleasant surprise, Dr. Peshkin told The Times. She consistently worked long hours, well past midnight, and he feared she would burn out if she didn’t take more breaks.
“Something has happened to the fabric of society,” Harvard researcher Leon Peshin says. “Something is happening.”
Dr. Peshkin, who collaborates on research with a laboratory in Paris, asked Petrova to visit his colleagues while she was there. One of the lab’s scientists had figured out how to slice superfine sections of a frog embryo, enabling accelerated analysis, he told The Times, but mailing samples from Paris had failed because they thawed in transit and were ruined.
“I said, ‘Well, you’re there.’ Why don’t you get this package?”
Ordinarily, Petrova’s failure to disclose the embryos – and it’s not clear that’s quite what happened – would result in forfeiture of the unclaimed material and a fine of about $500. Her lawyer says the fine is typically cut to $50. And in no event is someone deported.
But Petrova is clearly being treated differently.
Why?
Is she a Russian spy? No evidence of that has been presented, and aside from the protest arrest, she has no criminal record. The evidence suggests, in fact, that she has no love for Putin’s government and would not be at all inclined to spy for it.
Did Putin ask for the Trump administration to send her back? Possibly. She had gained a reputation in Moscow for her abilities, so she is likely known to the government – a government that also would likely punish her severely for her criticism of it.
Is this happening because Trump is angry at Harvard? Perhaps, but her arrest occurred before the heated rhetoric over Harvard’s funding and its defiance of his order to impose his ideology, such as it is, in the classroom.
So why are U.S. officials treating her as if she’s Al Capone among the petri dish set?
“The individual was lawfully detained after lying to federal officers about carrying biological substances into the country,” a spokesperson for the Department of Homeland Security told The Times. “Messages on her phone revealed she planned to smuggle the materials through customs without declaring them. She knowingly broke the law and took deliberate steps to evade it.”
Petrova disputes the description of the phone messages – she had texted Dr. Peshkin while on the tarmac – but in any event, the alleged “crime” seems quite minor. There was nothing dangerous about the frog embryos. Rational people would see this as a misunderstanding and send Petrova on her way.
ICE officials have twice denied her lawyer’s requests for parole, claiming she’s a flight risk and a threat to national security.
A threat to national security? Armed with frog embryos?
On Monday, a judge at a preliminary immigration hearing in Louisiana ruled that the government’s Notice to Appear – initiating deportation proceedings – didn’t meet legal standards, NBC News reports. The government must refile, and another hearing is set for July.
Petrova’s attorney, Greg Romanovsky, said three government trial attorneys and a deputy chief counsel from ICE attended the hearing, an unusual show of legal power so early in immigration proceedings. “In my 25 years of practice, I’ve never seen anything like it,” he told NBC.
Harvard officials, interestingly, have been fairly quiet about the incident, saying only that they’re monitoring the situation – a stark contrast to the university’s high-decibel fight with Trump over other matters.
My guess is that Harvard officials don’t want to increase the risk of Petrova’s deportation, cognizant of Trump’s notoriously thin skin and thirst for retribution. It’s probably not wise to drag Petrova into that.
But support is obviously needed.
Dr. Peshkin told The Times he’s tried to rally colleagues in other laboratories on campus to come to Petrova’s defense. But, sadly, many have declined. They’re here on visas just like her, and they fear drawing attention to themselves, he said.
“Something has happened to the fabric of society,” he said. “Something is happening.”
Indeed, as NBC News has noted, there is growing evidence that valuable scientific minds are fleeing, avoiding or being chased out of the United States because of cases like Petrova’s: “A recent survey by the scientific journal Nature revealed that 75% of the 1,600 scientists surveyed were considering relocating to Europe or Canada, citing actions taken by President Donald Trump. Separately, a tracking database from Inside Higher Ed shows that, as of April 18, more than 240 colleges and universities have reported that over 1,550 international students and recent graduates have had their legal status changed by the U.S. State Department.”
Petrova’s colleagues miss her. They say she was contributing to groundbreaking research on both aging and cancer. She has written computer scripts to analyze images in a microscope used in cancer research, and they say her knowledge of how to make the most of those scripts and the microscope is extremely difficult, if not impossible, to replace.
None of those things matters to the Trump administration, its enablers in Congress or its supporters in homes across United States.
“I feel like something is happening generally in America,” Petrova says. “Something bad is happening. I don’t think everybody understands.”