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 in the day, a government lawyer told a federal judge that the Trump administration intends to deport Ms. 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 Ms. 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 Ms. Petrova later this month, apparently setting the stage for her release.
Ms. 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, punishable with a fine. Instead, the customs official canceled Ms. Petrova’s J-1 visa on the spot and initiated deportation proceedings.
Christina Reiss, chief judge of the United States District Court in Vermont, repeatedly quizzed the government lawyers about their grounds for canceling Ms. Petrova’s visa and detaining her.
“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 criminal charges will further complicate Ms. Petrova’s desire to remain in the United States and return to her laboratory at Harvard Medical School. Ms. Petrova told colleagues on Wednesday afternoon that she had been abruptly told to gather her things because she was leaving ICE custody.
Ms. 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.”
He said the Vermont hearing had established that Ms. Petrova was detained unlawfully.
“Almost immediately after the hearing, we were blindsided by the unsealing of a meritless criminal complaint,” Mr. Romanovsky said. “The timing of Kseniia’s transfer out of ICE custody into criminal custody is especially suspect because it happened right after the judge set a bail hearing for her release.”
In the event Ms. Petrova is convicted, the smuggling charge could lead to a sentence of up to 20 years in prison, or a fine of up to $250,000. In the criminal complaint, a federal agent states that Ms. Petrova “fraudulently and knowingly” imported undeclared biological specimens, including samples on slides and “frog embryos in microcentrifuges.”
The complaint details text messages between Ms. Petrova and her colleagues in which she says she has “no plan” for carrying the samples through customs. The complaint also notes that before she left Russia, Ms. Petrova worked for a genetic research center with ties to the Russian government.
The actions of Ms. Petrova and the customs officer were cast very differently in the Vermont courtroom. Judge Reiss noted that she had reviewed the statute laying out the grounds for customs officers to find someone inadmissible to the United States, and “I don’t see anything about customs violations.”
Jeffrey M. Hartman, an attorney representing the Department of Justice, said “it’s the secretary of state’s authority” to cancel a visa, and that the secretary has delegated that authority to customs officials.
“The C.B.P. office was our first line of defense against unknown biological materials from a foreign national out of a port of entry,” he said.
Mr. Hartman argued that the federal court in Vermont had no jurisdiction over Ms. Petrova’s detention. He said Ms. Petrova may contest her detention, but only in an immigration court in Louisiana, where ICE is holding her.
“It’s not something that a district court can entertain,” he said. “We think the proper venue for that question is Louisiana, where she is detained and where her custodian is.”
“But she is only detained there because you moved her,” said the judge.
Judge Reiss asked the government to clarify whether or not it planned to deport Ms. Petrova to Russia.
“You are asking for her removal to Russia?” she asked.
“Yes, your honor,” Mr. Hartman replied.
Federal courts in Vermont have handed down a series of decisions frustrating President Trump’s immigration policy.
On May 9, Tufts doctoral student Rumeysa Ozturk was released from detention on the orders of a judge, William K. Sessions III, who said that her continued detention could chill “the speech of the millions and millions of individuals in this country who are not citizens.”
And on April 30, Judge Geoffrey W. Crawford ordered the release of Mohsen Mahdawi, a student organizer at Columbia University who was detained by immigration authorities during an interview for his naturalization. Both Ms. Ozturk and Mr. Mahdawi were singled out because they had vocally protested Israel’s military campaign in Gaza.
Ms. Petrova’s case has no apparent basis in any political activism. But the attorney general of Massachusetts, Andrea Joy Campbell, who filed an amicus brief in the case, said Ms. Petrova’s detention, like that of Ms. Ozturk, represented “reckless and cruel misuse of power to punish and terrorize noncitizen members of the academic community.”
Adam Sychla, a postdoctoral research fellow who organized a group of roughly 20 Harvard students and faculty members who traveled from Cambridge to the courthouse in Burlington, Vt., said he had never met Ms. Petrova, but had immediately decided to make the drive.
“Whether I know her personally or not, is immaterial,” he added. “I easily could have met her last week to start a collaboration. Instead, Kseniia is being unfairly detained.”
Miles J. Herszenhorn contributed reporting from Cambridge, Mass.
