Federal authorities said Harvard’s Kseniia Petrova “knowingly broke the law” amid their ongoing push to deport the Russian scientist.
Petrova, a bioinformatician at the Kirschner Lab at Harvard Medical School, was detained at Boston Logan International Airport on Feb. 16 as she returned from a trip to Paris.
Her attorney, Gregory Romanovsky, told Fox News that Petrova was bringing back frog embryos at the request of a professor at a French lab with which the Ivy League university was collaborating. According to Romanovsky, the sample was picked up in Paris and was supposed to be brought to Harvard and that Petrova was unaware she needed to claim them at customs.
“The individual was lawfully detained after lying to federal officers about carrying substances into the country,” the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) wrote in a post on X on Tuesday. “A subsequent K9 inspection uncovered undeclared petri dishes, containers of unknown substances, and loose vials of embryonic frog cells, all without proper permits.”
Kseniia Petrova, a Russian scientist working at Harvard Medical School, was detained at Boston Logan International Airport on Feb. 16 as she was returning from a trip to Paris. (Attorney Gregory Romanovsky)
The feds said messages found on the 30-year-old’s 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,” DHS alleged.
Petrova’s attorney has pushed back on that narrative, saying that failing to declare an object at customs is not enough grounds to cancel her visa. Rather, officials should have imposed a fine and seized the object, he said.
“CBP was authorized to seize the item and issue a fine,” he said. “Instead, they chose to cancel Ms. Petrova’s visa and detain her.”
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Kseniia Petrova, a bioinformatician at the Kirschner Lab at Harvard Medical School, was bringing back frog embryos at the request of a professor at a French lab with which Harvard was collaborating, her attorney told Fox News. (Gregory Romanovsky)
Romanovsky said that caused credible fear, and they were then seeking asylum for Petrova, who had previously been detained in Russia for anti-war protests shortly after the attack on Ukraine.
“She faces the threat of immediate arrest due to her prior political activism and outspoken opposition to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine,” he said.
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Petrova is being held at the Richwood Detention Facility in Louisiana and has an immigration court hearing scheduled for May 7 in Jena, Louisiana, related to her asylum case.
Kseniia Petrova is currently being held at the Richwood Detention Facility in Louisiana. (Facebook)
Her attorney was also challenging CBP’s actions at the airport: the visa cancellation. A federal court hearing was scheduled in that case for June 9 in the District of Vermont, but the plan was to ask them to expedite the hearing.
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“ICE is required to detain individuals … only if they are a flight risk or a danger to the community. Ms. Petrova is neither,” Romanovsky said. “Her continued detention serves no purpose and wastes limited government resources.”
