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

(www.nytimes.com)
167 points xnx | 8 comments | 11 Apr 25 14:10 UTC | HN request time: 0.202s | source | bottom
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FirmwareBurner ◴[11 Apr 25 14:32 UTC] No.43654233[source]▶
>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?

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1. lofatdairy ◴[11 Apr 25 15:57 UTC] No.43655304[source]▶
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.

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2. FirmwareBurner ◴[11 Apr 25 16:13 UTC] No.43655477[source]▶
>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.

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3. lofatdairy ◴[11 Apr 25 16:28 UTC] No.43655649[source]▶
You're missing the point. Obviously people need to be careful right now. But framing this situation as the fault of victims rather than the fault of bad policy makes it seem like bad things things only happen in response to conscious decisions and to an extent it absolves the policymakers from responsibility. It dilutes productive discussion regarding bad policy and instead frames all injustices as the consequence of breaking the law.

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.

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4. absolutelastone ◴[11 Apr 25 16:43 UTC] No.43655818{3}[source]▶
You always need to be careful when it comes to customs really. Some minor things like certain foods and OTC medicines can have big ramifications in many countries, including losing your visa. If you're a business person counting on using a multi-year visa to do your job, you can screw up your career by getting it revoked.

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.

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5. watwut ◴[11 Apr 25 16:52 UTC] No.43655911[source]▶
It was not a fish. It was people doing active decision to abuse power. Both on low level (agents) and top level (president and his sociopathic circle).

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

6. lofatdairy ◴[11 Apr 25 16:58 UTC] No.43655969{4}[source]▶
Completely agree, I think that an abundance of caution is extremely important to practice when engaging with these systems, especially given the political climate. I just think that discussing counterfactuals in this particular case is unproductive and the original comment needlessly insensitive.
7. kashunstva ◴[11 Apr 25 17:25 UTC] No.43656253[source]▶
> All you have to do is lay low and not break any laws or do things that attract attention of the authorities

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.

8. FirmwareBurner ◴[11 Apr 25 19:20 UTC] No.43657467{3}[source]▶
>But framing this situation as the fault of victims rather than the fault of bad policy

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.