"Something has happened to the fabric of society"

04-13-2025

Roger Berkowitz

Fred McFeely Rogers, better known as Mister Rogers, taught my generation of Americans a fundamental empathy for friends and neighbors. Bullied and often alone as a child, Rogers created a show that spoke to a basic respect for our neighbors.

The United States is, of course, a complicated country. It is the country of chattel slavery and genocide against Native Americans. It is, as Hannah Arendt argued, a wild and violent country with a frontier mentality that celebrates vigilante justice. At the same time, there is a traditional American respect for individuals as worthy of self-government, and a history of collective action and civic engagement. There is also superficial friendliness characteristic of Americans’ relations to strangers that nevertheless contributes to a sense of neighborliness essential to a country of immigrants. And there is the idea of the country as a “city on the hill,” a bastion of freedom and a refuge for immigrants, the huddled masses, yearning to be free. Rogers’ show, Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood, ran for 33 years, and the opening song became an American classic. 

It’s a beautiful day in this neighborhood,
A beautiful day for a neighbor.
Would you be mine?
Could you be mine?

It’s a neighborly day in this beauty wood,
A neighborly day for a beauty,
Would you be mine?
Could you be mine?

I have always wanted to have a neighbor just like you,
I’ve always wanted to live in a neighborhood with you.
So let’s make the most of this beautiful day,
Since we’re together we might as well say,
Would you be mine?
Could you be mine?
Won’t you be my neighbor?
Won’t you please,
Won’t you please?
Please won’t you be my neighbor?

I’ve been thinking of Mister Rogers every time I read about another one of our neighbors who has been rounded up, deprived of their legal right to reside amongst us, deposited in detention centers around the country, and threatened with deportation. It is one thing to arrest and deport people who are in the country illegally. It is also popular among Americans to deport legal immigrants who have committed serious crimes. But surveys show that large majorities of Americans oppose the mean-spirited practice of canceling visas and seeking to deport students, professors, and workers who have done nothing wrong. 

Again and again, we are seeing our law-abiding neighbors threatened, arrested, and deported for no good reason. This arbitrary cruelty by customs officials is celebrated by the President and his administration. Beyond normalizing angry boorishness, it spreads fear and intimidation throughout communities across the country.

Some of those targeted for having their visas revoked engaged in constitutionally protected First Amendment rights of protest. This cynical attack on those legally here who possess the rights of freedom is wrong. But increasingly, we are seeing numerous accounts of neighbors who came to the United States legally and are being arrested and deported for fully arbitrary reasons. Consider the truly disturbing case of Kseniia Petrova. As Ellen Barry writes, 

For nearly eight weeks, Kseniia Petrova has been captive to the hard-line immigration policies of the Trump administration. A graduate of a renowned Russian physics and technology institute, Ms. Petrova was recruited to work at a laboratory at Harvard Medical School. She was part of a team investigating how cells can rejuvenate themselves, with the goal of fending off the damage of aging.

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.

Such an infraction is normally considered minor, punishable with a fine of up to $500. Instead, the customs official canceled Ms. Petrova’s visa on the spot and began deportation proceedings. Then Ms. Petrova told her that she had fled Russia for political reasons and faced arrest if she returned there.

This is how she wound up at the Richwood Correctional Center in Monroe, La., waiting for the U.S. government to decide what to do with her.

Petrova fled Russia after she was arrested for protesting Russia’s war on Ukraine. She was recruited by Harvard where she refused on principle to agree to a condition requiring her to stop criticizing Russia in exchange for security clearance. Her qualifications were so exceptional that Harvard proceeded to hire her as a contractor. A “supernerd,” Petrova worked long hours and was an invaluable and well-liked member of her community.

When she took a rare vacation to Europe last month, she agreed to her boss’ request to stop by a lab in Paris and pick up some frog embryo samples needed in the lab. As Petrova landed in Boston, she texted her boss to ask how she should declare the samples at customs. The conversation was cut short as she exited the plane and she decided, it seems from the article, not to declare the samples as she passed through customs. Here is how Barry describes what happened next.

As [Petrova] 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.

Then a different officer came into the room, and the tone of the conversation changed, Ms. Petrova said. This officer asked detailed questions about the samples, Ms. Petrova’s work history and her travel in Europe. The official then informed Ms. Petrova that she was canceling her visa and asked her whether she was afraid to be deported to Russia.

“Yes, I am scared to go back to Russia,” she said, according to a Department of Homeland Security transcript provided by her lawyer. “I am afraid the Russian Federation will kill me for protesting against them.”

Ms. Petrova’s attorney, Greg Romanovsky, said that Customs and Border Protection had overreached its authority by canceling her visa. He acknowledged that she had violated customs regulations but said it was a minor offense, punishable by forfeiture and a fine.

To cancel her visa, Mr. Romanovsky said, the agents needed to identify grounds for excluding her. “There are many, many grounds of inadmissibility, but violating a customs rule is certainly not one of them,” he said.

Lucas Guttentag, a professor at Stanford Law School, reviewed documents in the case and agreed. He said that Ms. Petrova had been legally admitted to the United States, and then “the government itself created the alleged improper immigration status that is now the basis for her detention.”
“Subjecting anyone to this process is wrong, and this case is both shocking and revealing,” said Mr. Guttentag, who served as a senior Justice Department advisor under President Biden and senior advisor to the D.H.S. during the Obama administration.

So why is this happening? What is the reason for treating principled, law-abiding, hard-working neighbors who want to contribute to American science and technology like unwanted criminals? These are not people here illegally. These are not people on welfare. These are not criminals. Victims like Petrova are not even people who have exercised their constitutional rights—guaranteed to all persons legally in the United States—to exercise their First Amendment rights. She was targeted simply for a mistake at customs control.

Like Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia, a Maryland man who was mistakenly arrested and deported to El Salvador because of what the government now calls an administrative error, Petrova was simply someone who came to the United States legally and was a good neighbor. What kind of angry boorishness leads to treating our neighbors in this way? 

There is a profound anger animating the mistreatment of innocent neighbors in ways that are simply mean. Where does the anger come from? The traditional answer of the left is racism. I don’t doubt racism plays a role in some of these deportations. But that simply doesn’t apply in cases like Petrova’s. Many of the people being rounded up and stripped of their legal visas are white Europeans. No, instead, the anger appears to be fueled by a long-simmering class resentment. There is a contempt for globalized elites, people like Petrova who have excellent educations and are at home in elite institutions around the world. 

When one hears J.D. Vance speak about Europeans, lawyers, and professors, there is a palpable anger at those he thinks of as rootless cosmopolitans, those who prefer other members of their global community to nationals and fellow citizens rooted in tribal American identities. In short, the mean-spiritedness bubbling to the surface of the war on elite universities and law firms is deeply embedded in the belief that the global cosmopolitan class is corrupt and soulless. 

There is, sadly, some truth to the charge that many of our elite institutions have lost their way. The fact that the major law firms in the country have so quickly buckled under pressure from the Trump administration shows how far these firms have strayed from their mission of defending the law and justice. What large corporate law firms care about is money measured in the tens and hundreds of millions of dollars. These firms could fight these shakedowns, but doing so would cost them clients and money. That is what they will not do. 

Similarly, elite universities have long since ceased to be primarily educational institutions. The ease with which the threat of losing federal research funding has brought university administrations to heel is evidence that these sprawling institutions are caught up in a game of money, prestige, and power. 

None of this is to justify the cruel and wrongheaded way that the Trump administration is going about its attempt to punish elite institutions. But if we are to resist this attack on our legal and educational institutions, we need to understand both its source and the reason for its success. 

Perhaps nothing so clearly manifests the corruption of academia as well as the silence of Harvard and so many of its brilliant professors about Petrova’s abduction and detention. The school, possessed of a $53 billion endowment, has not publicly defended Petrova. Many of her colleagues, worried about their own privileged positions, are silent. Courage and principle are in short supply. If the elites at our elite institutions are unwilling to fight for the principles on which the country is based, it is hard to shed many tears for them as they are cruelly and mercilessly attacked by a petulant President and his band of resentful sycophants who are tearing apart the fabric of our society. What is truly disappointing is how easy it is to rip up the elite institutions of a decaying world. As Barry writes:

[Petrova’s] colleagues are distracted and anxious; work in the laboratory has stalled. When Dr. Peshkin made the rounds of Harvard laboratories, asking colleagues to send letters of support for her to ICE, many of them confessed that they were afraid to put their names on paper — because they were in the country on temporary visas as well.

“Something has happened to the fabric of society,” he said. “Something is happening.”

Worry about her case has also radiated across networks of Russian émigrés and scientists.

“She is an indicator that the world is becoming almost evil and dangerous for people who are homeless and mean no harm to anyone,” said Dr. Severinov, the biologist who recruited Ms. Petrova in Russia. “It is an irony that this is becoming so on both sides of the pond.”

Marina Sakharov-Liberman, the granddaughter of the Soviet physicist and dissident Andrei Sakharov, has been following the case from her home in London. She said it was “extraordinary” that Harvard had not more publicly protested Ms. Petrova’s detention and demanded her release.

“That is something that I would expect in Russia,” she said. “Everyone would be afraid. If someone was ‘disappeared,’ the institutions would be silent. Very few people would raise their voices and risk their positions.”