Judge Rules Customs Wrongly Canceled Harvard Researcher's Visa

A federal judge in Burlington ruled last week that a U.S. Customs and Border Protection officer had no legal authority to cancel the visa of a Harvard Medical School researcher stopped at Boston Logan International Airport in February 2025 while carrying frog embryo samples.

Judge Christina Reiss called the cancellation “arbitrary” and “capricious” in a 21-page decision. The researcher, Kseniia Petrova, 30, is a Russian-born geneticist who’d flown in from France without properly declaring the embryos, which court records describe as scientific research samples. Reiss didn’t leave her reasoning buried.

“The undisputed facts reveal that Ms. Petrova’s visa was impermissibly canceled because of the frog embryo samples and for no other reason,” Reiss wrote.

Federal lawyers didn’t argue that Petrova lied about why she was entering the country or that her reasons for coming conflicted with the terms of her J-1 work-study visa. Reiss wrote that “Without that, she found no valid legal basis for the cancellation.”

Petrova’s attorney described the incident as an “inadvertent failure” to declare the samples on a customs form. According to VTDigger, the attorney argued that failing to declare non-dangerous items typically results in a fine or forfeiture, not visa cancellation. Customs took the harder path anyway.

After the cancellation, Petrova was held at the federal women’s facility in South Burlington for roughly a week.

The ruling fits a pattern. Vermont’s federal bench has become an unlikely center of gravity for immigration cases that have gone against the Trump administration’s enforcement posture. Federal Judge William K. Sessions III granted the release of a Tufts University student briefly held in ICE custody in Vermont. Judge Geoffrey Crawford ordered the release of a Columbia University student detained while living in Vermont. That’s three significant rulings from a small state that doesn’t usually make national immigration headlines.

That string of decisions matters beyond Vermont’s borders. Researchers at Dartmouth and other Northeast institutions regularly move biological specimens across international lines for fieldwork and collaborative lab projects. The Connecticut River valley puts Dartmouth within easy reach of several major research universities, and faculty in Dartmouth’s Department of Biological Sciences work with amphibian species throughout the Upper Valley. Frog embryos aren’t the exotic edge case they might sound like.

Global amphibian populations have declined sharply, and the kind of specimen-based research Petrova was conducting sits at the center of conservation biology. Regulating what researchers can carry through U.S. airports isn’t a niche customs question, it touches a whole scientific community. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service administers international wildlife trade agreements that govern when specimens require permits, and the lines between a regulatory violation and visa cancellation weren’t clear before Reiss drew them.

Petrova’s attorney said the government’s response was wildly disproportionate to the underlying infraction. “The penalty for this kind of oversight shouldn’t be the destruction of someone’s entire research career,” the attorney told VTDigger in 2026.

Whether the Trump administration appeals the ruling isn’t yet clear. What’s clear is that three federal judges in Vermont have now issued rulings that directly check the administration’s immigration enforcement in 2025 and 2026, and the Petrova case adds a layer those earlier decisions didn’t have: the question of what a border agent can legally do to a scientist carrying specimens through an American airport.

For graduate students and postdocs at Dartmouth who travel internationally with lab materials, the answer Reiss gave is the one that matters.