She Worked in a Harvard Lab to Reverse Aging, Until ICE Jailed Her

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?

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 don’t see them in the street protesting for universal healthcare until it happens.

The public is nihilistic until their jobs are threatened, even then a single weekend warrior protest and back to the office. The sort of indifference for others until the issue hits home is endemic in America; see Republicans who hate gays until a niece or nephew comes out the closet. Sad, sad, people

Politicians come from American communities, families, schools… it’s a shame so many live with the stress of the cognitive dissonance of their lack of effort and their projection of empty platitudes and memes about themselves

> Then, as she headed toward the baggage claim, a Border Patrol officer approached her and asked to search her suitcase. All she could think was that the embryo samples inside would be ruined; RNA degrades easily. She explained that she didn’t know the rules. The officer was polite, she recalled, and told her she would be allowed to leave.

I can't speak for Boston, but every American airport I've traveled through internationally has had you pick up bags at the baggage claim, then take it to customs. (After all, a bag search may be involved; you can't really declare something in your bag if you don't have your bag.) This timeline of events seems odd.

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.

Like HN users probably would broadly agree that advising people to "just don't act shady" doesn't make the PATRIOT act okay. Nor is it particularly helpful because both the scope of what can be considered suspicious or unlawful is well beyond what a normal person can be expected to considered their actions. The average person commits 3 felonies a day, the enforcement of which is essentially discretionary and means that anyone can be made subject to arbitrary punitive measures.

Certainly there's a frustration with how impotent one can feel about the law and politics, I don't disagree that we should try to control what we can and avoid putting ourselves into compromising situations. But that said I don't think criticizing the victims of injustice helps anyone or is ever the right thing to do.

Immigration (can you enter) --> international baggage claim --> customs (can your stuff enter) --> transfer bag drop.

edit: Same setup for Boston, it seems?

https://www.jal.co.jp/jp/en/inter/airport/bos/info/

Immigration: "Customs declaration form - not required"

Then baggage claim, then...

Customs: "Please show your passport and customs declaration form. (Your customs declaration form will be collected here.) If you have any items to declare, please declare them to an official."

Of course I think people should get second chances, especially naive students. The professor should also have been mindful of this risk and made sure she complied with the rules too.

Not that you can reach that point without stating your declarations on the record. I think it was one of the kiosk stages.

They are not force of nature and it is 100% reasonable to blame them and only them.

I 100% agree with this, this is what the majority asked for (and probably still want, hatred seems to run deeper than self-interest).

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.

More likely what you suggest is necessary but not sufficient. The Administration claimed that all of the people sent to the El Salvador prison were violent criminals. In fact, 90% were no such thing. I think you are overestimating the degree to which the rule of law - due process in particular- is now operative in the United States.

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 see my message hasn't gotten through, so I will repeat it one last time.

You can't change the policy on the spot just because you think it's bad. Therefore as a traveler you must adapt to the policy of the destination country, even if you think it's bad, not the other way around. That's how it works in every democratic country. Go to Germany or anywhere else and start braking laws that you think are bad (and there are plenty of those) and see where that gets you. A friend of mine got 3 fines on his business trip to Germany he swore he's never setting foot there again.

If you dislike the policies of a foreign country, just don't go there, simple. Don't emigrate to a country and then complain about them throwing the book at you when you break a law, because as a non-citizen, nobody will care about your situation. Sad but true.

Yeah as an immigrant this sucks, but this is how the world works everywhere. Until you become a naturalized citizen, you have to adapt to the host country's stupid laws to the T as you're always more vulnerable than the citizens.

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.