And yet, at any moment, the bridge can be removed—erased not for failure but for being built without permission.
Even in the sciences, where skill is supposedly neutral, those rules hold. Kseniia Petrova, a postdoctoral researcher at Harvard, was detained this winter for transporting undeclared lab samples. Her case, like others, was complicated by her vocal opposition to Russia’s war. The work she was doing—research on amphibian cardiac regeneration—had nothing to do with politics. But the visa system did.³⁴
“You don’t need to be guilty to be gone,” she said. “You just need to be foreign and inconvenient.”
These aren’t exceptions. They are the architecture of a system that makes presence provisional.
As of January 2025, USCIS data confirmed more than 100 Ukrainian and Russian DACA recipients remained in legal limbo⁵. The same month, the courts reaffirmed a ban on new applications. In February, at least two educators and three researchers with active DACA protection were detained across the country⁶.
But those numbers don’t live where the story lives. They don’t crouch beside a pediatric bed. They don’t scan doorways between rounds. They don’t smell like bleach and rust and sleeplessness. They don’t promise you a path and then erase it mid-step.
Back at San Francisco General, Marcela passed the pediatrics wing where she used to volunteer before med school. A little boy stood in the hallway, clutching his mother’s scarf.
“Hey,” she said, kneeling beside him. “You waiting for someone?”
He nodded. “Doctor.”
She smiled. “Me too.”
Outside, the wind carried acetone, orange peel, and rust. It smelled like a promise that hadn’t been kept.
Bibliography
1. Los Angeles Times. “Dreamers in Scrubs: DACA Doctors Fill Crucial Gaps in U.S. Healthcare.” March 2022. Overview of DACA recipients in medical training and their disproportionate role in underserved hospitals.
2. United States Senate Judiciary Committee. “Hearing on the Dream Act: Testimony of Ola Kaso.” June 28, 2011. Full transcript of Kaso’s public appeal to remain in the U.S. and continue her medical education.
3. Human Rights Watch. “Russia: Wartime Repression Intensifies.” April 2024. Documentation of Russia’s crackdown on anti-war speech, including academic and scientific communities.
4. Novaya Gazeta Europe. “Russian Scientists and Anti-War Activists Face Charges Under New Military Defamation Laws.” February 2024. Reporting on post-invasion Russian legal escalation.