She worked in a Harvard Lab
A shift in the atmosphere
Ms. Petrova’s return flight from Paris landed in Boston on the evening of February 16. When the plane was on the asphalt, she wrote with Dr. Peshkin an SMS and tried to confirm how to treat the package in customs. Until then, the passengers have already taken the plane, he said, and Ms. Petrova broke off the conversation.
First, said Ms. Petrova, her re -entry felt normally. At Passport Control, an official examined the J-1 visa that Harvard had sponsored and identified it as biomedical researchers. The official stamped her passport and admitted it to the country.
Then, when she made the luggage company, a border police officer turned to her and asked to search her suitcase. Everything she could think was that the embryo samples were ruined inside; RNA worsens slightly. She explained that she did not know the rules. The officer was polite, she remembered and told her that she could go.
Then another officer came into the room and the tone of the conversation changed, said Ms. Petrova. The latter asked detailed questions about the rehearsals, Ms. Petrova’s work history and her journey in Europe. Ms. Petrova then informed the official that she canceled her visa and asked if she was afraid of being deported to Russia.
“Yes, I’m afraid to return to Russia,” she said, according to a department for home protection department provided by her lawyer. “I’m afraid that the Russian Federation will kill me because I have protested against it.”
The lawyer of Ms. Petrova, Greg Romanovsky, said that customs and border protection had exceeded his authority by canceling her visa. He admitted that she had violated the customs regulations, but said that it was a minor offense that was punished with decay and fine.
To cancel her visa, said Mr. Romanovsky, the agents had to identify reasons for the exclusion of her. “There are many, many reasons of inadmissibility, but it is certainly none of them to violate a customs rule,” he said.
Luca’s Guttentag, professor at Stanford Law School, checked documents in the case and agreed. He said Ms. Petrova was legally approved in the United States, and then “the government itself created the alleged improper immigration status, which is now the basis for her detention.”
“It is wrong to subject someone to this process, and this case is both shocking and revealing,” said Guttentag, who acted at DHS during the Obama government as a consultant of the high -ranking Ministry of Justice under President Biden and Senior Advisor.
In February, customs officials Ms. Petrova held at the Logan International Airport in Boston because they did not explain rehearsals from frogryons.Credit…M. Scott Brauer for the New York Times
A spokesman for the DH asked why Ms. Petrova’s visa had been canceled that a dog test petriels and vials found embryonic stem cells in her luggage without proper permits.
“The person was legally imprisoned after liberating federal officials into the country via the carrying bag,” said the spokesman. “Messages on their phone showed that they plan to smuggle the materials through customs without declaring them. She knowingly broken the law and took intentional steps to avoid it.”
When the border protection officer canceled Ms. Petrova’s visa, she was united under the thousands of Mr. Trump’s thousands. She was sent to the Richwood Hard Center to wait for a hearing in which she will present her case for Asylum to an immigration judge.
“If she wins, she won’t be deported,” said Romanovsky. “When she loses, it will be deported to Russia.”
He also submitted a petition for her release to a federal court. “Basically, I plead for mercy,” he said. “She would have been outside in another environment a long time ago.”
Ms. Petrova has spent the last month in a dormitory that was fed with floors. It is cold and at night the women sometimes tremble under thin blankets. Once a day you can allow one hour outside. Breakfast comes at different times, sometimes already 3:30 a.m. the most difficult, she said, is the constant sound. The psychiatrists of the facility gave her earplugs to help her sleep.
She cannot work and watches the women around them. About half are Latin Americans in the thirties and forties who have crossed the border for economic reasons, she said. A second group consists of Asians and citizens of former Soviet countries who legally searched the border and political asylum.
None of them deserve to capture under these conditions, she said. “I found that impossible to be in this situation,” she said. “Even immigrants here have to have some rights. But it seems that nobody really takes care of our rights here.”
It has questioned the view of America that she founded in Russia. “This is not the kind of America that I used to know,” she said.
