A Russian scientist from Harvard Medical School has been detained by US Immigration and Customs Enforcement, according to her friends and colleagues.
On Wednesday, Cora Anderson, who works with the Russian scientist Kseniia Petrova, shared the news of Petrova’s detention on Facebook, saying the Russian scientist arrived at Boston Logan international airport on 16 February from a trip to France when she was stopped by US authorities.
According to Anderson, authorities revoked Petrova’s visa and told her that she was to be deported to Russia. In response, Petrova said that she feared political persecution and was instead sent by authorities to a detention facility, Anderson said.
“We had no idea initially what had happened to her since she was unable to send any messages or make any calls upon detention. She was moved to a facility in Vermont at first and then Louisiana where she is now. Where she is now is a jail that has space rented by ICE and is kept in a room with over 80 other female detainees,” Anderson wrote in her Facebook post.
“Despite having lawyers and the fact she did not do anything illegal in the first place, she is still there, and we have no idea when she will be paroled (or released, however simply released is unlikely),” she added.
Petrova’s boss, Leon Peshkin, said in an interview on Thursday that the researcher had good reason to fear being returned to Russia because she had publicly protested the Russian invasion of Ukraine in its first days, called for the impeachment of Vladimir Putin, the Russian president, and was arrested. She managed to flee, first to the former Soviet republic of Georgia and then to the United States, to continue her research on genomes.
Peshkin said that Petrova was a highly skilled researcher – “she is spectacular, the best I’ve ever seen in 20 years at Harvard,” – and had a visa that enabled her to work in the US and travel abroad freely. In February, however, when she was in Paris on vacation, her boss “made a huge mistake”. He asked her to pick up a box of frog embryo samples from colleagues in France and bring them back to the lab at Harvard.
The import of these samples, Peshkin said, was legal, but Petrova made some sort of paperwork mistake on the US customs declaration form and was stopped by customs officers on her return to Logan airport in Boston.
Although the legal penalty for improperly importing this non-toxic, non-hazardous frog material is simply a fine of up to $500, Peshkin said, immigration officers decided to deny Petrova re-entry to the US. When she informed the authorities of her very real fear of being jailed for protesting Putin’s war on Ukraine should she be returned to Russia, “she was transferred to Ice, into detention, to wait for an asylum hearing,” Peshkin said.
Petrova should be eligible for parole while she waits for that hearing, Peshkin added, “but paroles are now not happening”.
A GoFundMe page set up by Anderson for Petrova said that the researcher was hired to work for Harvard Medical School and had entered the US on a work visa. Anderson did not specify which work visa category Petrova was under. She said that Petrova is “supported in applying for a new visa” but added that it is a “multi-month process during which she will not be able to work thus not collect a paycheck”.
Reports of Petrova’s detention come just weeks after a French scientist was denied entry in the US this month after US immigration officers searched his phone and found messages critical of Donald Trump.
But Petrova’s boss told the Guardian that she does not seem to have had her visa revoked over any type of protest activity in the US. She never protested against Trump or in support of Palestinians under siege in Gaza, Peshkin said.
Also earlier this month, Canadian citizen Jasmine Mooney was detained by US authorities and was held by Ice for two weeks before being released. In another case, a German tourist, 29-year-old tattoo artist Jessica Brösche, spent six weeks in detention including eight days in solitary confinement after she was arrested at the Mexican border on 18 February.
In recent weeks, federal authorities have detained a handful of other university students and researchers – including green card holders – who have expressed Palestinian solidarity amid Israel’s deadly war on Gaza. Earlier this week, 30-year-old Rumeysa Ozturk, a Turkish doctoral student at Tufts University, was detained by masked federal officials in dramatic footage that has caused widespread outrage.
Immigration officials also detained Palestinian activist and Columbia graduate Mahmoud Khalil – a green card holder – earlier this month in front of his pregnant wife, Noor, a US citizen. Other students detained by immigration officials include Badar Khan Suri, an Indian postdoctoral fellow at Georgetown University, after the Department of Homeland Security accused him of having ties to Hamas.
