Trump Admin Files Smuggling Charges Against Detained HMS Researcher, Plans to Deport Her To Russia
15th May 2025
The Harvard Crimson, a Voice of the Children of the Crust.
Government lawyers said the Trump administration plans to deport Kseniia Petrova, a Harvard Medical School researcher detained by Customs and Border Protection officials in February, back to Russia at a Wednesday hearing.
According to The New York Times, the lawyers said at the hearing — held in Vermont — that the government would move to deport Petrova to Russia despite concerns that it would be dangerous for her to return to the country, where she was arrested in 2022 for protesting Russia’s war in Ukraine. Gregory Romanovsky, her attorney, said returning to the country would be “suicide” for Petrova in a March interview with The Crimson.
Two days earlier, on Monday, the government filed criminal smuggling charges against Petrova in federal district court in Massachusetts. The smuggling charges in Massachusetts were unsealed by a judge on Wednesday, the same day as the Vermont hearing.
CBP officials arrested Petrova at Boston Logan airport in February for allegedly failing to declare frog embryos she was attempting to bring back into the country from a trip to France for her research. She has been detained at an Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention facility in Louisiana since.
You would think that people whose presence in this country was on fragile ground would take the obvious precauttion of not making waves. But proglodytes can’t help themselves.