Federal authorities said Harvard’s Kseniia Petrova “knowingly broke the law” amid their ongoing push to deport the Russian scientist.
Petrova, who works as a bioinformatician at the Kirschner Lab in Harvard Medical School, was stopped at Boston Logan International Airport on her way back from Paris on Feb. 16.
Her lawyer, Gregory Romanovsky, informed Fox News that Petrova had brought back frog embryos as requested by a professor from a French laboratory collaborating with Harvard. Romanovsky stated that the samples were obtained in Paris for delivery to Harvard, and Petrova was not aware that she needed to declare them at customs.
The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) stated in an announcement on X that Petrova was detained legally for providing false information to federal officers about transporting substances into the country. A subsequent inspection with a K9 revealed unreported petri dishes, containers holding unknown substances, and vials of embryonic frog cells, all lacking the necessary 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.”
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.
“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.”
