A federal judge on Wednesday said she would grant bail to Kseniia Petrova, a Russian scientist employed by Harvard University, in an immigration case stemming from Ms. Petrova’s failure to declare scientific samples she was carrying into the country.
“There does not seem to be either a factual or legal basis for the immigration officer’s actions” in stripping Ms. Petrova of her visa on Feb. 16, Christina Reiss, chief judge of the U.S. District Court in Vermont, said in a court hearing.
The judge said the available evidence suggested that the samples Ms. Petrova carried into the country were “wholly non-hazardous, non-toxic, non-living, and posed a threat to no one.” She also said that “Ms. Petrova’s life and well-being are in peril if she is deported to Russia,” as the government has said it intends to do.
Unlike other high-profile deportation cases involving academics, Ms. Petrova’s began with a customs violation. Returning to Boston from a vacation in France, she agreed to carry back samples of frog embryos from an affiliate laboratory at the request of her supervisor at Harvard Medical School.
When the samples were discovered during an inspection of Ms. Petrova’s baggage at Logan Airport, the customs official canceled her visa on the spot and started deportation proceedings. She was transferred to an Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention center in Louisiana, where she remained for more than three months.
“This is kind of a circular process, because it was the government that revoked her visa,” Judge Reiss said on Wednesday. “And it’s essentially saying, ‘We revoked your visa, now you have no documentation and now we’re going to place you in removal proceedings.”
She concluded that “what happened in this case was extraordinary and novel,” and that if she did not take action in the case “there will be no determination” that Ms. Petrova’s constitutional rights had been violated.
“Bail is necessary to make the habeas remedy effective in this case,” she said.
However, it is unclear when the government will allow Ms. Petrova’s release on bail, or whether it will pursue its plan to deport her to Russia. The case has attracted high-level attention from officials in the Trump administration, who took an unusual step earlier this month, after Judge Reiss indicated she planned to release Ms. Petrova.
Hours after that hearing, the Department of Justice unsealed felony smuggling charges against Ms. Petrova based on her failure to declare the scientific samples, and Ms. Petrova was arrested and transferred to the custody of the U.S. Marshals Service in Louisiana, where she remains.
Ms. Petrova’s next opportunity for release will come after she is transferred to Massachusetts to face the smuggling charges. But the government also issued a detainer on immigration charges, raising the possibility that, if a judge grants her bail in the criminal case, the government could ask ICE to detain her once again.
Judge Reiss asked Jeffrey M. Hartman, the attorney representing the Department of Justice at the bail hearing, whether that would happen.
He said he did not think so, citing the recent releases of Mohsen Mahdawi, a student organizer at Columbia University, and Rumeysa Ozturk, a doctoral student at Tufts University.
“My understanding of the Ozturk and Mahdawi cases is that the government has not re-detained those noncitizens, and I would expect the government to adhere to the same course of action,” Mr. Hartman said.
Ms. Petrova, 31, the graduate of an elite Russian physics and technology institute, was recruited in 2023 to work at a laboratory at Harvard Medical School studying the earliest stages of cell development. The Kirschner Lab, where she worked, is exploring ways to repair damage to cells that lead to diseases like cancer.
Ms. Petrova has admitted that she failed to declare the samples. Her lawyer has argued that this would ordinarily be treated as a minor infraction, punishable with a fine.
When Ms. Petrova told the customs officer that she had fled Russia for political reasons and faced arrest if she returned there, she was transferred to ICE custody to wait an asylum hearing, a process that can take months or years.
A spokesperson for the Department of Homeland Security said on Wednesday that Ms. Petrova “was lawfully detained after lying to federal officers about carrying substances into the country.”
“Messages found on her phone revealed she planned to smuggle the materials through customs without declaring them,” the spokesperson said. “She knowingly broke the law and took deliberate steps to evade it.”
Announcing the criminal charges, Leah B. Foley, the U.S. attorney for the District of Massachusetts, said Ms. Petrova’s academic credentials and Harvard affiliation did not shelter her from the law.
“The rule of law does not have a carve-out for educated individuals with pedigree,” she said.
Among the witnesses at Wednesday’s bail hearing was Michael West, a molecular biologist who said the samples Ms. Petrova carried back from France were fertilized frog eggs that had been fixed in formaldehyde, rendering them “non-hazardous in nature, and non-toxic, non-living.”
He compared them to shoe leather or paper, substances that “once had a biological origin” but had been transformed into “protein and nucleic acids” that could be used for scientific study.
He added that they had no apparent commercial value. “I read the news reports and I felt that there must be some kind of misunderstanding,” he said. “It went against everything I understand about developmental biology.”
In Wednesday’s hearing, Mr. Hartman, the government lawyer, argued that, Ms. Petrova’s case was no longer under Judge Reiss’s jurisdiction, and that it should be heard by an immigration court in Louisiana.
Judge Reiss said, however, that the immigration court would not consider violations of Ms. Petrova’s constitutional rights, or whether the customs officer had acted improperly in stripping her of her visa.
“If this court doesn’t decide it, nobody will be deciding those issues,” she said.
She said the evidence suggested the officer had, in fact, acted improperly, and that it was important to establish that.
“The circumstances of this case are capable of repetition, not only in Ms. Petrova’s case, but in other cases as well,” she said.
Ellen Barry is a reporter covering mental health for The Times.
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