The article left me with a couple questions - is cancelling a visa for not declaring something like frog embryos normal protocol? Does ICE have evidence that not declaring them was intentional? In any case, I really hope she doesn't get deported. If it was just a mistake, this seems like an abuse of power.
> Does ICE have evidence that not declaring them was intentional? I
They say they do: “Messages on her phone revealed she planned to smuggle the materials through customs without declaring them. She knowingly broke the law and took deliberate steps to evade it.”
> The article left me with a couple questions - is cancelling a visa for not declaring something like frog embryos normal protocol?
A visa like J-1 can be cancelled at the port of entry for a variety of reasons. Doesn't mean she immediately loses her status. With a visa like that you're essentially at the mercy of the State Dept. You can still reply but you have to exit the US. The normal procedure would have been to immediately send her to Russia. The idea is, you go back to your home country and re-apply. But they didn't do that and "let her" stay in detention since Russia is a dangerous place for her.
> They say they do: “Messages on her phone revealed she planned to smuggle the materials through customs without declaring them. She knowingly broke the law and took deliberate steps to evade it.”
I'd note that these are the same folks asserting people with no criminal records are convicted criminals.
"In a press briefing last week, White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt was asked how many people arrested had a criminal record. She said, 'All of them, because they illegally broke our nation's laws, and, therefore, they are criminals, as far as this administration goes.' But Carlos came to the U.S. through a legal pathway, although the CBP One app he used was shut down by Trump as soon as he took office."
That's the problem with trust and reputation. Once it's gone, it's pretty hard for anyone to just trust you on this. How can anyone believe this administration when it says someone is a criminal without a video of them doing a crime at this point? And why were they looking through her phone anyway?
> Such an infraction is normally considered minor, punishable with a fine of up to $500.
I'm also wondering how you are supposed to declare something like this. They don't pass out those customs forms on flights from Europe anymore, you just go through immigration and the officer asks whatever questions they feel like. In my case the only question was "did you buy anything".
I have filled plenty of paperwork for customs, my employer explained me what I had to do, because I imported stuff on behalf of my employer. I could have also just tried to hide it in my luggage, but then it wouldn’t surprise me if my visa was revoked as well. Why would you mess with customs, in particular if you do this not for your personal fun?
Normally, when you are leaving the baggage claim area, there are two customs corridors - green one for people who have nothing to declare, and red for people who wish to make a customs declaration.
There are plenty of examples of abuse of power. This is clearly just yet another one of them. DEI is in full display with this administration, except for them DEI stands for division with egregious ignorance. Even if it was a mistake, good luck getting the government to do anything about it - see Abrego Garcia. The administration just up and put the DoJ lawyer who admitted to the court that they made a mistake in sending him to El Salvador on administrative leave [0]. There's no way they will back down, as it would be a sign of weakness. Heck, even the Supreme Court majority ruled that the government must make an effort to return him to the US [1], so we will have a major showdown between two of the branches of government shortly.
We've whipsawed so far away from any norms that the majority "normal" people in the center are just left stunned at how we got here. And the ones who voted for this shitshow are fed a constant diet of lies and propaganda to keep them in line - things get bad? Refill the rage canister by rolling out Kristi Noem with some more made-for-insta reels in front of the "bad" people locked up in CECOT.
Then the EU will have to make visas easier to get. Immigrants flocked to the USA for high wages and accessible visa or open enough border that they knew once they made it 100 miles in there was only 1% chance they get locked up to die in an immigration camp in central America.
The EU still has both those barriers, that many of their countries guard their work permits more fiercely than their own balls, and their wages are lower than places like Dubai with far easier to get work visa. If the EU isn't careful their cake will be stolen by authoritarian places like Singapore and Dubai that have comparatively free trade and easy work permits.
It's easier to get a work visa or employment based permanent residency in most EU countries than in the US. Partly because there are no quotas for higher-end work visas or permanent residency permits. And partly because the EU does not have a large number of illegal immigrants available for lower-end jobs.
Imagine that H-1Bs would be available in unlimited quantities any time of the year, as long as you meet the minimum requirements. And that the H-1B would be extended to a green card after a few years, assuming the authorities don't find anything too bad in the background checks. That's how it works in the EU.
European countries are generally more protectionist about working class jobs than professional jobs. If you have the education, skills, and experience, they assume that your presence would be good for the economy. And the citizens don't really complain. I guess a major reason is that the primary identities are national, while legal rights are EU-wide. If there are already hundreds of millions of foreigners who could apply for the same jobs, who cares about a small number of additional immigrants.
Belittling them is the only approach that will work. They have such a thin skin and fragile egos that making logical arguments, following procedure, or addressing this via well established "norms" just results in them getting their rocks off on telling you to F off. See [0] just as one example of many.
On the other hand, pointing out the lunacy of their actions, their hypocrisy, and malice through satire, parody and straight up bullying is the only way to truly break through the shell they've built around that fragile ego they're carrying around. Just my opinion.
This kind of "smuggling" or failure to declare live specimens is very common in biological research on. This is the third time I've heard of international collaborations playing fast and loose with the law. (The other two were finding ways to send live samples by mail.)
>On Feb. 16, customs officials detained her at Logan International Airport in Boston for failing to declare samples of frog embryos she had carried from France at the request of her boss at Harvard.
Big fuck up on her boss here. You don't send your immigrant workers on a visa (especially from countries currently involved in a war) to be mules for you, since their visas can always be cancelled for any reason, so why are you putting them in situations where they can give authorities a reason?
How do they not know this? What were they thinking? Either go yourself or send someone else who's a citizen. The lack of thought in this just boggles my mind.
Also, where's the self preservation on her part, especially given her via situation and the situation in her country? When I as an immigrant traveled for work with hardware prototypes , I always made sure my boss had them in his luggage since he's a citizen with a more powerful passport and I don't want to be flagged by border controls on what's a foreigner doing with strange hardware in his luggage.
You don't just accept to be a mule for your employer when you're an immigrant on a visa since then you're just playing Russian roulette(pun not intended). If I were a Russian citizen on a visa abroad right now, I'd do everything in my power to lay low, fly under the radar and avoid all unnecessary travel, or travel with only pajamas and a toothbrush, not with animal embryos. I guess biology scientists are so used to travelling with weird shit all the time, they just forget to declare it.
Edit: @downvoters, do you have any arguments to add?
You're probably right that it was a fuck-up. But given that she was carrying frog embryos and not something illegal I don't understand why the government would revoke her visa. Just give her a warning and move on.
Not a downvoter, but the idea of proportionality is core to liberal democracies. It’s why only illiberal states would cut off the hands of a petty thief, or execute drug offenders, and so forth. Wrecking a person’s life over frog embryos, irrespective of her imprudence or her boss’s carelessness is a disproportionate response. That’s my argument. It smacks of the sort of arbitrary cruelty and pettiness that runs through the very core of this administration.
Sure, but when border agents are legally allowed to act as judges, juries and executioners on the spot, why is it surprising this happens?
They see hundreds or thousands of plane travelers pass by them per day maybe, they don't have time to assess each individual case by case. They're legally allowed to cut before measuring when they encounter someone who broke a law. They don't care that person didn't know the law.
This has nothing to do with the orange man, but with the powers border agents have at their discursion which inevitably results in both false positives and false negatives on a daily basis.
I think this is placing the blame on the victims rather than the policies that are actually allowing these things to happen. Like the PI clearly made a mistake, but it's a minor one whose consequences have been made wholly disproportionate due to xenophobic policy.
He's even quoted as admitting as much in the article:
>No one at Harvard feels worse than Dr. Peshkin. Again and again, he has asked himself why he allowed Ms. Petrova to take the risk of carrying the samples. He rereads the text exchange he had with Ms. Petrova while she was sitting on the plane.
Also Dr. Peshkin didn't send her, she was already there for vacation:
>Dr. Peshkin worried she would burn out. He was relieved when she told him she was taking a vacation to France, where the pianist Andras Schiff was giving a concert. She bought theater tickets and planned trips to see friends from Moscow, now scattered across Europe.
>“I said, ‘Well, you’re there,’” Dr. Peshkin said. “Why don’t you get this package?”
So not only is this lack of empathy it's also mischaracterizing the situation.
>I think this is placing the blame on the victims rather than the policies that are actually allowing these things to happen.
If you're a fisherman on a lake and a fish just jumps in your boat, is it your fault or the fish's fault? You were just doing your fisherman job.
You(individually) can't change the bad policies of the country you emigrated to because you're not a citizen with voting rights, right? But you can adapt your behavior to not fall in the trap of those bad policies, right?
All you have to do is lay low and not break any laws or do things that attract attention of the authorities, like you know, travelling with undeclared embryos, which is not something average travelers usually do.
"Yeah but your country's laws are stupid, so give me a break" is not a defense that ever works for immigrants, which means they're at the mercy of trigger happy border enforcement agents who are just following the law, which says they can deport anyone for any reason they see fit.
I think many western people with powerful passports don't realize, that when you're a guest in a country (especially with a weak passport) you really need to be a lot more paranoid than the locals on the rules and regulations of the host country since you'll have no local rights and no embassy to bail you out if you fuck up. The speed limit says 100? Well, you drive at 90 just to be sure. Yeah, it sucks, but that's life.
You'll find the people downvoting are mostly not people. It seems to be a naive de-amplification when certain posts have above a threshold of activity, where negative and neutral sentiment is downvoted.
While you need at least 500 karma points to see the downvote mechanism, apparently its been possible to downvote using curl or other software after attaching certain nonces without any kind of verification that the account meets that requirement.
A guy interested in this was tinkering and found that out in another post. Not sure if the guy ended up reaching out to dang or not.
I didn't go about verifying it, but the post he tinkered in definitely was downvoted by several points and the account used had only single digit karma (almost brand new).
As for what happened, its pretty clear that the boss follows the academic and government stereotype of the corrupt magistrate. Leveraging someone who can't say no for fear of reprisal (and she immigrated from such an environment so its fresh).
In any case, this is just an example of how totalitarian our society has become, and how it has followed the predictable indicators similar to that which lead up to Hitler's rise to power.
There has been a running debate that when communism fails to subvert and seize power, totalitarianism rises in response. A lot of historian's have been working hard lately.
> “Messages on her phone revealed she planned to smuggle the materials through customs without declaring them. She knowingly broke the law and took deliberate steps to evade it.”
Wonder what the wording is. If it is more like "-I am brining the embryos", "-ok" it will be hard to prove it. Or if it's more like "It's illegal, don't declare them, look at the customs people smile but don't smile or stare too much". They still managed to ruin her life of course over it.
And I agree with another downvoted poster currently that this was a fuckup on her boss. It's not like he didn't know the current environment. If you hold a J-1 or F-1 visa you don't want to be traveling and crossing any US borders if you can avoid it. It wasn't safe years ago, and it's even more unsafe now. Just going to France to see a performance doesn't seem like an appropriate risk. Doing anything illegal at all, and you're now in jeopardy. You're essentially at the mercy of the State Dept to revoke your visa at any time. If you have lawyers you can fix it in court, but I that is a major uphill battle.
Readit News
They say they do: “Messages on her phone revealed she planned to smuggle the materials through customs without declaring them. She knowingly broke the law and took deliberate steps to evade it.”
> The article left me with a couple questions - is cancelling a visa for not declaring something like frog embryos normal protocol?
A visa like J-1 can be cancelled at the port of entry for a variety of reasons. Doesn't mean she immediately loses her status. With a visa like that you're essentially at the mercy of the State Dept. You can still reply but you have to exit the US. The normal procedure would have been to immediately send her to Russia. The idea is, you go back to your home country and re-apply. But they didn't do that and "let her" stay in detention since Russia is a dangerous place for her.
I'd note that these are the same folks asserting people with no criminal records are convicted criminals.
https://www.npr.org/2025/02/04/nx-s1-5282379/trumps-mass-dep...
"In a press briefing last week, White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt was asked how many people arrested had a criminal record. She said, 'All of them, because they illegally broke our nation's laws, and, therefore, they are criminals, as far as this administration goes.' But Carlos came to the U.S. through a legal pathway, although the CBP One app he used was shut down by Trump as soon as he took office."
Deleted Comment
I'm also wondering how you are supposed to declare something like this. They don't pass out those customs forms on flights from Europe anymore, you just go through immigration and the officer asks whatever questions they feel like. In my case the only question was "did you buy anything".
We've whipsawed so far away from any norms that the majority "normal" people in the center are just left stunned at how we got here. And the ones who voted for this shitshow are fed a constant diet of lies and propaganda to keep them in line - things get bad? Refill the rage canister by rolling out Kristi Noem with some more made-for-insta reels in front of the "bad" people locked up in CECOT.
[0] https://www.reuters.com/world/us/us-sidelines-doj-lawyer-aft... [1] https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/24pdf/24a949_lkhn.pdf
The EU still has both those barriers, that many of their countries guard their work permits more fiercely than their own balls, and their wages are lower than places like Dubai with far easier to get work visa. If the EU isn't careful their cake will be stolen by authoritarian places like Singapore and Dubai that have comparatively free trade and easy work permits.
Imagine that H-1Bs would be available in unlimited quantities any time of the year, as long as you meet the minimum requirements. And that the H-1B would be extended to a green card after a few years, assuming the authorities don't find anything too bad in the background checks. That's how it works in the EU.
European countries are generally more protectionist about working class jobs than professional jobs. If you have the education, skills, and experience, they assume that your presence would be good for the economy. And the citizens don't really complain. I guess a major reason is that the primary identities are national, while legal rights are EU-wide. If there are already hundreds of millions of foreigners who could apply for the same jobs, who cares about a small number of additional immigrants.
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On the other hand, pointing out the lunacy of their actions, their hypocrisy, and malice through satire, parody and straight up bullying is the only way to truly break through the shell they've built around that fragile ego they're carrying around. Just my opinion.
[0] https://shop.gop.com/products/liberal-tears-mug
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Big fuck up on her boss here. You don't send your immigrant workers on a visa (especially from countries currently involved in a war) to be mules for you, since their visas can always be cancelled for any reason, so why are you putting them in situations where they can give authorities a reason?
How do they not know this? What were they thinking? Either go yourself or send someone else who's a citizen. The lack of thought in this just boggles my mind.
Also, where's the self preservation on her part, especially given her via situation and the situation in her country? When I as an immigrant traveled for work with hardware prototypes , I always made sure my boss had them in his luggage since he's a citizen with a more powerful passport and I don't want to be flagged by border controls on what's a foreigner doing with strange hardware in his luggage.
You don't just accept to be a mule for your employer when you're an immigrant on a visa since then you're just playing Russian roulette(pun not intended). If I were a Russian citizen on a visa abroad right now, I'd do everything in my power to lay low, fly under the radar and avoid all unnecessary travel, or travel with only pajamas and a toothbrush, not with animal embryos. I guess biology scientists are so used to travelling with weird shit all the time, they just forget to declare it.
Edit: @downvoters, do you have any arguments to add?
The current make up of the executive, congress, the senate, and the judiciary.
It was illegal not declaring she was carrying embryos. Wasn't that clear from the article?
Not a downvoter, but the idea of proportionality is core to liberal democracies. It’s why only illiberal states would cut off the hands of a petty thief, or execute drug offenders, and so forth. Wrecking a person’s life over frog embryos, irrespective of her imprudence or her boss’s carelessness is a disproportionate response. That’s my argument. It smacks of the sort of arbitrary cruelty and pettiness that runs through the very core of this administration.
Sure, but when border agents are legally allowed to act as judges, juries and executioners on the spot, why is it surprising this happens?
They see hundreds or thousands of plane travelers pass by them per day maybe, they don't have time to assess each individual case by case. They're legally allowed to cut before measuring when they encounter someone who broke a law. They don't care that person didn't know the law.
This has nothing to do with the orange man, but with the powers border agents have at their discursion which inevitably results in both false positives and false negatives on a daily basis.
He's even quoted as admitting as much in the article:
>No one at Harvard feels worse than Dr. Peshkin. Again and again, he has asked himself why he allowed Ms. Petrova to take the risk of carrying the samples. He rereads the text exchange he had with Ms. Petrova while she was sitting on the plane.
Also Dr. Peshkin didn't send her, she was already there for vacation:
>Dr. Peshkin worried she would burn out. He was relieved when she told him she was taking a vacation to France, where the pianist Andras Schiff was giving a concert. She bought theater tickets and planned trips to see friends from Moscow, now scattered across Europe.
>“I said, ‘Well, you’re there,’” Dr. Peshkin said. “Why don’t you get this package?”
So not only is this lack of empathy it's also mischaracterizing the situation.
If you're a fisherman on a lake and a fish just jumps in your boat, is it your fault or the fish's fault? You were just doing your fisherman job.
You(individually) can't change the bad policies of the country you emigrated to because you're not a citizen with voting rights, right? But you can adapt your behavior to not fall in the trap of those bad policies, right?
All you have to do is lay low and not break any laws or do things that attract attention of the authorities, like you know, travelling with undeclared embryos, which is not something average travelers usually do.
"Yeah but your country's laws are stupid, so give me a break" is not a defense that ever works for immigrants, which means they're at the mercy of trigger happy border enforcement agents who are just following the law, which says they can deport anyone for any reason they see fit.
I think many western people with powerful passports don't realize, that when you're a guest in a country (especially with a weak passport) you really need to be a lot more paranoid than the locals on the rules and regulations of the host country since you'll have no local rights and no embassy to bail you out if you fuck up. The speed limit says 100? Well, you drive at 90 just to be sure. Yeah, it sucks, but that's life.
While you need at least 500 karma points to see the downvote mechanism, apparently its been possible to downvote using curl or other software after attaching certain nonces without any kind of verification that the account meets that requirement.
A guy interested in this was tinkering and found that out in another post. Not sure if the guy ended up reaching out to dang or not.
I didn't go about verifying it, but the post he tinkered in definitely was downvoted by several points and the account used had only single digit karma (almost brand new).
As for what happened, its pretty clear that the boss follows the academic and government stereotype of the corrupt magistrate. Leveraging someone who can't say no for fear of reprisal (and she immigrated from such an environment so its fresh).
In any case, this is just an example of how totalitarian our society has become, and how it has followed the predictable indicators similar to that which lead up to Hitler's rise to power.
There has been a running debate that when communism fails to subvert and seize power, totalitarianism rises in response. A lot of historian's have been working hard lately.
Wonder what the wording is. If it is more like "-I am brining the embryos", "-ok" it will be hard to prove it. Or if it's more like "It's illegal, don't declare them, look at the customs people smile but don't smile or stare too much". They still managed to ruin her life of course over it.
And I agree with another downvoted poster currently that this was a fuckup on her boss. It's not like he didn't know the current environment. If you hold a J-1 or F-1 visa you don't want to be traveling and crossing any US borders if you can avoid it. It wasn't safe years ago, and it's even more unsafe now. Just going to France to see a performance doesn't seem like an appropriate risk. Doing anything illegal at all, and you're now in jeopardy. You're essentially at the mercy of the State Dept to revoke your visa at any time. If you have lawyers you can fix it in court, but I that is a major uphill battle.
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