Editor’s note, May 14, 2025: Attorneys for Kseniia Petrova appeared in federal court in Burlington on Wednesday morning. During a mostly procedural hearing, a judge set another court date for May 28.
A Vermont judge on Wednesday will hear arguments in the case of a Russian scientist who was conducting groundbreaking research at Harvard University before getting swept up in the Trump administration’s hard-line immigration crackdown.
Kseniia Petrova, 30, has been in federal custody since February 16, when she was detained by customs officials at the Logan International Airport in Boston for failing to declare samples of frog embryos that she was transporting from France. Petrova told the officials that she was carrying the embryos at the request of her boss at Harvard Medical School — where she has worked as a researcher since 2023 — and that she hadn’t realized they needed to be declared, according to court records.
Rather than issue a warning or a fine, which experts say is typical for such infractions, the Trump administration canceled Petrova’s visa and began deportation proceedings.
She was turned over to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, transported to a Vermont processing center and eventually sent to a Louisiana detention facility. She has spent the past few months in a crowded dormitory-style room with nearly 100 other women, she said.
Petrova has told immigration authorities that she fears she will be arrested or killed if she is returned to Russia, triggering an asylum claim now pending in immigration court.
A separate federal lawsuit challenging her detainment was filed in Vermont in February under a pseudonym in an attempt to avoid drawing the attention of the Russian government. She later agreed to reveal her identity once her case garnered national media coverage.
The Department of Homeland Security said in a statement that Petrova was detained after “lying to federal officers” and that she “knowingly broke the law and took deliberate steps to evade it.”
Her attorneys dispute that characterization and say her minor, inadvertent customs infraction does not provide legal justification to revoke her visa. On Wednesday, they will ask U.S. District Court Judge Christina Reiss to free Petrova while her case proceeds.
Massachusetts Attorney General Andrea Joy Campbell filed an affidavit in support of Petrova this week that describes her arrest as the latest in a series of actions taken by the federal government to “unlawfully target” international students and researchers. They include Rumeysa Ozturk, the Turkish graduate student from Tufts University whom a Vermont judge last week ordered to be released from custody.
The high-profile detainments have threatened America’s role as a leader in scientific innovation, Campbell wrote.
Petrova’s case has been closely followed by the scientific community, which includes many foreign researchers in the U.S. on temporary visas. Her detention has also come at the expense of vital public health research. Petrova has been conducting anti-aging and cancer research and is the only person at Harvard who possesses the skills required to use a one-of-a-kind cancer-detecting microscope.
The New York Times published an op-ed on Tuesday that Petrova dictated to one of the paper’s editors through multiple phone calls from the ICE detention facility. She described how she hopes the judge will grant her release on Wednesday so that she can return to her work.
“There is a data set that I’m halfway finished analyzing,” she wrote. “I want to go home and finish it.”
Petrova’s detention has complicated the perspective she once had of America as a “paradise for science,” one that had felt like an entirely different universe from her native country.
As a teenager, Petrova participated in protests against President Vladamir Putin, she told the Times in an April profile, and she continued her activism as the Russian leader plunged his country into war with Ukraine in 2022.
But she was arrested and fined for participating in an anti-war demonstration. The experience, combined with the increasingly difficult task of pursuing scientific discovery in an authoritarian country engaged in a costly war, convinced Petrova that she could no longer work as a scientist in her home country.
She arrived in the U.S. to find a “flourishing” scientific community, she wrote in her op-ed.
“There was freedom of discourse; conferences, seminars,” she wrote. “It was nothing like the environment I had left behind in Russia, where international sanctions meant there weren’t enough supplies to do experiments and I once declined a job offer that was contingent on me no longer protesting the war in Ukraine.”
Petrova’s colleagues have described her as a gifted mind whose dedication to her work borders on the obsessive. She arrived in Boston with nothing but a backpack, the Times reported, and she would routinely spend upwards of 14 hours a day in the lab, where she found ways to drastically improve her colleagues’ workflows.
Much of her time has been spent working with a microscope known as the Normalized Raman Imaging, or NoRi, that the Harvard lab created. The microscope can measure the chemical makeup of cells to “astonishing and novel degree of precision,” Petrova wrote in her op-ed.
She asked that the Times also post some never-before-published photos taken by the microscope of rat and mouse organs. The images, which resemble abstract works of art, offer kaleidoscopic glimpses into the building blocks of life that Petrova said may one day help pave the way to treating diseases such as Alzheimer’s and cancer.
She hoped that seeing the images would help people understand why she is so desperate to get back to the lab, where the research has stalled without her.
“There is so much beauty in what we can learn through science, in how complicated life is, and in trying to understand how it works,” she wrote. “It’s what motivates me to wake up every morning.”
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