After four months in ICE detention facilities, a researcher who fled Russia, Kseniia Petrova, has been released. What did she allegedly do to deserve the revocation of her visa? She transported harmless samples as requested by her supervisor at a Harvard lab (pro tip: those of us who have ever worked for a principal investigator at a major university do not say no to requests to do something legitimately within the scope of the lab's research if we wish to keep working for that particular lab - trust me on that). Once her visa was revoked, she got to spend several months in US gulags. She decided, understandably to fight the deportation (as that would involve her ending up in another gulag in Russia for speaking out against the Russo-Ukraine war), and then got slapped with criminal smuggling charges. In other words, what was at most a minor paperwork blunder could potentially land her a couple decades in prison or worse. For the time being, she is not cleared to go back to work at her lab (unless she gets her visa reinstated), and she is still facing those smuggling charges, even though any sensible judge would likely throw that case out on its merits. Will she stay in the US long enough to face those charges? I seriously doubt it. She is already looking at options to continue working outside of the US. In other words, the US will lose a promising scientist because of a very hardline xenophobic approach to non-citizens working in the US. She is not the only international scholar to get placed in one of the US's ICE gulags. And that is a reminder that the US is no longer a place for promising scholars to start their careers. In the case of Kseniia Petrova, I doubt she'll be in the US any longer than it takes to pack up her belongings and take the next research job available. I don't blame her.
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