Every night at midnight, Will Trim sits down to the piano in his Boston apartment and waits for lights out in the Louisiana ICE detention center where his best friend is being held.
His cellphone rings. On the other end, Kseniia Petrova is silent. She leans against a brick wall in a freezing ward with 101 other women, cradling one of six working phones to her ear. She listens.
Trim plays Bach or Chopin to calm her until the jail line clicks off at the 15-minute mark and she – a shy, 30-year-old Harvard scientist with no history of immigration violations or criminality – retreats to the bunk where she has slept for nearly three months in immigration detention.
"I know he is very worried about me," Petrova told USA TODAY, using one of the phones.
"Maybe I should be tougher," said Trim, a biologist, who works in a Harvard Medical School lab with Petrova, his colleague and roommate. "But even after three months, the music doesn’t sing anymore unless she calls and wants to hear it."re..