Prosecutors on Tuesday sought to drop charges against a Russian-born scientist accused of smuggling frog embryos into the United States, after she argued that she had been unfairly singled out amid a Trump administration crackdown on immigration.
Since her arrest in February 2025, the scientist, Kseniia Petrova, a researcher at Harvard, has argued that she was vindictively prosecuted.
A federal judge in Massachusetts granted Ms. Petrova’s lawyers a broad discovery claim in April, which would have required the government to furnish evidence about similar cases.
Rather than provide the court those documents, the government moved on Tuesday to drop the smuggling case against Ms. Petrova.
In their petition to drop the charges, prosecutors said they could not provide such evidence because it would mean disclosing “non-public information about CBP operations and investigative techniques,” referring to U.S. Customs and Border Protection.
The government also said its decision was not based on Ms. Petrova’s claims of government overreach, calling her accusations “meritless.”
“The government anticipates that additional discovery disputes and litigation of a motion to dismiss would divert significant time and attention from more substantial federal interests,” David Holcomb, an assistant U.S. attorney, wrote in the petition. “At this stage, the resource costs of continuing this prosecution outweigh the public interest in its resolution.”
Ms. Petrova’s case was an early example of the administration’s hard-line immigration policies that have had a chilling effect on foreign students and academics.
William Fick, an attorney for Ms. Petrova, said in a statement that the government should never have brought the case against his client and that his team was pleased by the decision to dismiss the charges.
“Ms. Petrova only sought to advance medical research into aging that could benefit everyone, and her handling of scientific samples — inert, non-living, non-toxic, frog embryos — never posed any danger to anyone,” Mr. Fick said. “Throughout these proceedings, Ms. Petrova has shown tremendous courage, and we are relieved that this chapter of her terrible ordeal will soon be over.”
Ms. Petrova was detained at Boston’s Logan International Airport in February 2025 after customs officials discovered she was carrying undeclared biological samples in her luggage. Ms. Petrova was vacationing in France when her supervisor at Harvard asked if she could bring back some biological samples from a French laboratory.
Her lawyer argued that failure to declare such items would normally have been a relatively minor infraction, but her visa was canceled on the spot. She was taken into custody and threatened with deportation, before being released four months later on bail.
In April, in a separate immigration case, a district court judge in Vermont ruled that Ms. Petrova’s visa had been “impermissibly canceled.” That judge called the cancellation of her visa “arbitrary [and] capricious,” “not in accordance with law” and “without observance of procedure required by law.”
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