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For months, the Harvard researcher Kseniia Petrova has challenged efforts to deport her to her native Russia for a customs violation. This week, the government charged her with a criminal felony.
Kseniia Petrova, a Harvard researcher from Russia who has been fighting deportation proceedings since February, will now face felony smuggling charges in Massachusetts, a federal judge in Louisiana said on Thursday.
Ms. Petrova made a brief court appearance Thursday morning via video from a jail in Monroe, La., near the Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention center where she has been held for nearly three months.
During the hearing, Ms. Petrova listened quietly as U.S. Magistrate Judge Kayla D. McClusky read her the criminal complaint in the smuggling case, which carries a sentence of up to 20 years in prison. “Yes, I understand,” she said.
After her attorney expressed Ms. Petrova’s desire to be transferred to Massachusetts for further proceedings, Judge McClusky agreed to allow the transfer back to Boston.
The smuggling charges against Ms. Petrova came unexpectedly, and legal experts said the decision to bring criminal charges at this stage in an immigration case was unusual.
The charges were announced just as Ms. Petrova’s legal challenge to her detention appeared to move in her favor. She was initially detained at the airport in Boston in February, after failing to declare frog embryos that she was carrying into the country at the request of her Harvard supervisor to use as scientific samples.