A federal judge in Boston has dismissed all the smuggling charges against Harvard Medical School researcher Kseniia Petrova, granting on Wednesday the Trump administration prosecutors' own request to drop the case. In their filing, the prosecutors said that continuing the case would divert significant time and attention from more substantial federal interests.
The end came a day after U.S. Attorney Leah Foley asked leave to dismiss the indictment with prejudice — meaning it cannot be brought back — after District Judge Leo Sorokin cleared the way for Petrova to obtain evidence supporting her claim that she was being vindictively prosecuted. The prosecutors called her claims "meritless," but concluded in the filing that "the resource costs of continuing this prosecution outweigh the public interest in its resolution." A spokesperson for Foley declined to comment.
Petrova, a Russian-born biomedical researcher, was stopped at Boston's Logan International Airport in February 2025 as she returned from a trip to France. Customs and Border Protection agents flagged her checked duffel bag and found clawed frog embryos and other scientific samples that prosecutors said should have been declared to customs officials. Her scholar visa was revoked, she was held in immigration detention in Louisiana, and prosecutors brought the criminal case in May 2025 while a federal judge in Vermont weighed ordering her release; a Vermont judge later ruled the visa had been unlawfully canceled. Petrova was released on bail in June 2025 and pleaded not guilty to the smuggling and false-statement charges.
What decided the case was the fight over evidence. A magistrate judge found in April that Petrova had met the threshold to obtain evidence about why she was charged, and Judge Sorokin affirmed that order on October 8, calling the U.S. Attorney's public statement on the arrest "a meaningful piece of objective evidence tending to show the requisite vindictiveness" — while noting that no court has held the prosecution actually was vindictive. Faced with handing over records on other travelers' undeclared-item encounters and non-public customs policies, the government chose to end the case instead.
Petrova's attorney, Daniel N. Marx, welcomed the dismissal and said his client had endured an exceptionally difficult legal process. The dismissal with prejudice closes the criminal case for good: a researcher stopped over undeclared lab samples spent months in detention and a year and a half under indictment before the government itself concluded the case was not worth its resources — resources the prosecutors' own filing says belong on more substantial federal interests.
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