Harshkumar Patel, 29, and Steve Shand, 50, will each face four counts related to human smuggling at the federal courthouse in Fergus Falls, Minnesota, U.S. on Monday.
Prosecutors allege Patel and Shand were part of a sprawling operation, with people to scout for business in India, acquire Canadian student visas, arrange transportation and smuggle migrants into the U.S., mostly via Washington state or Minnesota.
They coordinated the trip of Jagdish Patel, his wife and their two young children into the U.S. across a near-empty stretch of the Canadian border in January 2022. All of them froze to death as wind chills reached minus-38 degrees Celsius that night as the family from Gujarat set out on foot to meet a waiting van. They walked amid vast farm fields and bulky snowdrifts, navigating in the black of an almost-moonless night.
Mr. Harshkumar Patel’s attorney, Thomas Leinenweber, said his client came to America to escape poverty and build a better life and “now stands unjustly accused of participating in this horrible crime.” Mr. Shand’s attorney’s did not return calls seeking comment. Prosecutors say Shand told investigators that Mr. Harshkumar paid him about $25,000 for five trips.
The two men are accused of being part of a sophisticated human smuggling operation feeding a fast-growing population of Indians living illegally in the U.S. Both have pleaded not guilty.
Over the five weeks the two worked together, documents filed by prosecutors allege they spoke often about the bitter cold as they smuggled five groups of Indians over that quiet stretch of border. “16 degrees cold as hell,” Mr. Shand messaged during an earlier trip. “They going to be alive when they get here?” On the last trip, on January 19, 2022, Mr. Shand was to pick up 11 more Indian migrants, including the Patels. Only seven survived.
Canadian authorities found the Patels later that morning, dead from the cold. In Jagdish’s frozen arms was the body of his three-year-old son, Dharmik, wrapped in a blanket.
Satveer Chaudhary is a Minneapolis-based immigration attorney who has helped migrants exploited by motel owners, many of them Gujaratis. Smugglers with ties to the Gujarati business community have built an underground network, he said, bringing in workers willing to do lowor even no-wage jobs.
“Their own community has taken advantage of them,” Mr. Chaudhary said.
The pipeline of illegal immigration from India has long existed but has increased sharply along the U.S.-Canada border. The U.S. Border Patrol arrested more than 14,000 Indians on the Canadian border in the year ending September 30, which amounted to 60% of all arrests along that border and more than 10 times the number two years ago.
By 2022, the Pew Research Center estimates there were more than 7,25,000 Indians living illegally in the U.S., behind only Mexicans and El Salvadorans.
In India, investigating officer Dilip Thakor said media attention had led to the arrest of three men in the Patel case, but hundreds of such cases don’t even reach the courts.