The Trump administration announced criminal smuggling charges on Wednesday against Kseniia Petrova, a Harvard scientist who was detained three months ago after failing to declare scientific samples she was carrying in her luggage.
In a hearing in federal district court earlier on Wednesday, a government lawyer told a federal judge that the Trump administration intends to deport Petrova back to Russia, a country she fled in 2022, despite her fear that she will be arrested there over her history of political protest.
The moves represent an escalation in the government’s case against Petrova, which in recent weeks has drawn attention from scientists and academics around the world.
And it brought the government into conflict with the federal judge in Vermont, which scheduled a bail hearing for Petrova later this month, apparently setting the stage for her release.
Petrova has admitted that she failed to declare the samples, but her lawyer has argued that this would ordinarily be treated as a minor infraction. Instead, the customs official canceled Petrova’s J-1 visa on the spot and initiated deportation proceedings. Christina Reiss, chief judge of the US District Court in Vermont, repeatedly quizzed the government lawyers about their grounds for cancelling Petrova’s visa.
“Where is that authority?” she asked. “Where does a customs and border patrol officer have the authority on his or her own to revoke a visa?” she said. “It’s got to be somewhere. Because there is no way that person has kind of an unlimited determination.”
The charges will further complicate Petrova’s desire to remain in the US and return to her laboratory at Harvard Medical School.
Petrova’s attorney, Gregory Romanovsky, said the criminal charge, “filed three months after the alleged customs violation, is clearly intended to make Kseniia look like a criminal to justify their efforts to deport her”.
“Almost immediately after the hearing, we were blindsided by the unsealing of a meritless criminal complaint,” Romanovsky said. “The timing of Kseniia’s transfer out of ICE custody into criminal custody is suspect because it happened right after the judge set a bail hearing for her release.”