Judge Rules Customs Wrongly Canceled Harvard Researcher's Visa

A federal judge in Burlington has ruled that a U.S. Customs and Border Protection officer unlawfully canceled the visa of a Harvard Medical School genetics researcher who arrived at Boston Logan International Airport carrying frog embryo samples in February 2025.

Judge Christina Reiss found the customs officer’s action “arbitrary” and “capricious” in a 21-page ruling issued this week. The case centers on Kseniia Petrova, 30, a Russian-born scientist who did not properly declare the frog embryos, described in court records as research samples, when she flew in from France.

“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.

The ruling is the latest in a series of decisions from Vermont federal courts that have pushed back against immigration enforcement actions by the Trump administration. Federal Judge William K. Sessions III earlier granted the release of a Tufts University student held briefly in ICE custody in Vermont. Judge Geoffrey Crawford ordered the release of a Columbia University student who was living in Vermont when federal agents detained him. Vermont’s federal bench has become an unlikely focal point for some of the country’s most closely watched immigration disputes.

That pattern matters for researchers at institutions across the Northeast, including Dartmouth, where graduate students and postdoctoral fellows routinely transport biological specimens across international borders for fieldwork and lab collaborations. The Connecticut River valley sits within easy reach of several major research universities, and faculty at Dartmouth’s Department of Biological Sciences regularly work with amphibian species native to the Upper Valley. A ruling on what customs officers can and can’t do with a work-study visa has real stakes for scientists moving materials through American airports.

Petrova had entered on a J-1 work-study visa. According to VTDigger, her attorney argued that the customs officer had no legal authority to cancel that visa over a failure to declare non-dangerous items, and that the typical penalty for such an omission is a fine or forfeiture, not visa cancellation.

Reiss agreed.

Federal government lawyers, the judge wrote, “do not claim Ms. Petrova offered contradictory or fraudulent reasons for seeking to enter the United States, nor do they claim her reasons for seeking admission to the United States conflicted with the purposes of her J-1 visa.” 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. After her visa was canceled, Petrova was held at the federal women’s prison in South Burlington for about a week before being transferred to an ICE facility in Louisiana. She filed a habeas corpus petition in Vermont federal court while still in South Burlington, arguing she was being unlawfully detained, and that filing established Vermont as the jurisdiction for her civil case.

Amphibian research carries particular weight right now. Global amphibian populations have declined sharply due to chytrid fungus, habitat loss, and climate change, and scientists moving embryos and tissue samples across borders are often doing conservation-critical work. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service oversees CITES permits for protected species, but frog embryos used in genetics research don’t always require them, depending on the species involved. Petrova’s attorney said the samples weren’t dangerous.

Petrova’s legal troubles didn’t end with Reiss’ ruling. She faces separate criminal proceedings in another federal jurisdiction, and her broader immigration status remains unresolved. The Vermont ruling addresses the civil question of whether her visa cancellation was lawful, not the criminal case.

Judge Reiss’ ruling doesn’t guarantee Petrova stays in the country. What it does do is put a clear limit on what a customs officer can do at an airport checkpoint when the only infraction is a paperwork error on research material.