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167 points xnx | 1 comments | | HN request time: 0.199s | source
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FirmwareBurner ◴[] 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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slibhb ◴[] No.43655195[source]
You're probably right that it was a fuck-up. But given that she was carrying frog embryos and not something illegal I don't understand why the government would revoke her visa. Just give her a warning and move on.
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FirmwareBurner ◴[] No.43655277[source]
>But given that she was carrying frog embryos and not something illegal

It was illegal not declaring she was carrying embryos. Wasn't that clear from the article?

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ceejayoz ◴[] No.43655362[source]
> At first, Ms. Petrova said, her re-entry felt normal. At passport control, an officer examined the J-1 visa that Harvard had sponsored, identifying her as a biomedical researcher. The officer stamped her passport, admitting her to the country.

> 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.

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1. twoodfin ◴[] No.43655508[source]
My experience has been that you’re asked if you have anything to declare in some form when you go through immigration/passport control.