> Does ICE have evidence that not declaring them was intentional? I

They say they do: “Messages on her phone revealed she planned to smuggle the materials through customs without declaring them. She knowingly broke the law and took deliberate steps to evade it.”

> The article left me with a couple questions - is cancelling a visa for not declaring something like frog embryos normal protocol?

A visa like J-1 can be cancelled at the port of entry for a variety of reasons. Doesn't mean she immediately loses her status. With a visa like that you're essentially at the mercy of the State Dept. You can still reply but you have to exit the US. The normal procedure would have been to immediately send her to Russia. The idea is, you go back to your home country and re-apply. But they didn't do that and "let her" stay in detention since Russia is a dangerous place for her.

> Such an infraction is normally considered minor, punishable with a fine of up to $500.

I'm also wondering how you are supposed to declare something like this. They don't pass out those customs forms on flights from Europe anymore, you just go through immigration and the officer asks whatever questions they feel like. In my case the only question was "did you buy anything".

There are plenty of examples of abuse of power. This is clearly just yet another one of them. DEI is in full display with this administration, except for them DEI stands for division with egregious ignorance. Even if it was a mistake, good luck getting the government to do anything about it - see Abrego Garcia. The administration just up and put the DoJ lawyer who admitted to the court that they made a mistake in sending him to El Salvador on administrative leave [0]. There's no way they will back down, as it would be a sign of weakness. Heck, even the Supreme Court majority ruled that the government must make an effort to return him to the US [1], so we will have a major showdown between two of the branches of government shortly.

We've whipsawed so far away from any norms that the majority "normal" people in the center are just left stunned at how we got here. And the ones who voted for this shitshow are fed a constant diet of lies and propaganda to keep them in line - things get bad? Refill the rage canister by rolling out Kristi Noem with some more made-for-insta reels in front of the "bad" people locked up in CECOT.

[0] https://www.reuters.com/world/us/us-sidelines-doj-lawyer-aft... [1] https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/24pdf/24a949_lkhn.pdf

Then the EU will have to make visas easier to get. Immigrants flocked to the USA for high wages and accessible visa or open enough border that they knew once they made it 100 miles in there was only 1% chance they get locked up to die in an immigration camp in central America.

The EU still has both those barriers, that many of their countries guard their work permits more fiercely than their own balls, and their wages are lower than places like Dubai with far easier to get work visa. If the EU isn't careful their cake will be stolen by authoritarian places like Singapore and Dubai that have comparatively free trade and easy work permits.

Every EU nation should be thinking about how to fast track and incentivize American immigration.

I am assuming that's pretty easy? Just apply to an EU university or job?

Calling them little tyrants is an understatement when the far right is repositioning America to be a major threat to the free world.

Yup. The brain drain driven by the dumpster-fire Trump administration is going to be immense, and it won't be confined to just immigrants.

There's research funding in the EU?

[dead]

Why? To reduce paperwork?

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.

> @downvoters, do you have any arguments to add?

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.

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.

You'll find the people downvoting are mostly not people. It seems to be a naive de-amplification when certain posts have above a threshold of activity, where negative and neutral sentiment is downvoted.

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.

The problem with this is that many areas of the law, such as immigration, are very much gray areas by design, or to put it more nicely, gentlemen's agreements. The understanding is that someone is making a major personal investment in coming to this country and living and working here. It's up to both sides to be reasonable and stick to the plan. Here, one side is viciously and vocally breaking all the agreements because they aren't personally benefiting by the terms of their office.

Don't worry, you have undoubtedly violated several statutes today alone. When there is no due process for your "enemies", there is no due process for anyone.