In the five-day jury trial of Harshkumar Ramanlal Patel and Steve Shand in an international human smuggling ring that resulted in the deaths of a family of four from Gujarat — who froze to death while attempting to cross the US-Canada border — one of the key testimonies and the only first-person migrant account was from 23-year-old Yash Patel, who survived the blizzard on January 19, 2022, and testified as a prosecution witness.
A court official told The Indian Express that Yash Patel told the jury through a Gujarati interpreter how local agents in Canada, including two Indian nationals in Harsh Patel’s network, had arranged a van to transport the migrants from an assembly point in a residential apartment in Winnipeg to Manitoba, where they would cross over to the US and meet Shand, the driver of a ‘white van’.
However, as the blizzard intensified, the van in Canada was stuck in the snow and the driver asked the migrants to cover the rest of the distance on foot “in a straight line” until they found the ‘white van’ at the US border.
Before they were packed into the van in Winnipeg, they were given jackets, rubber boots and gloves but were “uninformed about the blizzard”.
The official said, “Weather authorities and the Canadian police testified during the trial that none of the 11 migrants were dressed to face the blizzard, including the two children, who died along with their parents. The agents had, perhaps, underestimated the danger of a blizzard or did not care that some of them could freeze unto the bone. A possibility that the agents had expected was that their vehicle in Canada would be able to drive through the snow conditions and drop off the passengers at the Manitoba border, but the van was stuck in the blizzard and the migrants were left in the cold to cover the distance…”
Yash Patel told the federal jury Wednesday that none of the migrants had experience in navigating snow paths, and the blizzard was a brutal surprise that made “most of them want to give up” but “had no one to reach out to”. Phone messages exchanged that night between Harsh Patel and Shand, produced before the jury by the prosecution, reveal that the two men even discussed “if they (migrants) would make it alive”.
As the blizzard separated the group almost instantly, according to Yash Patel, most of the migrants continued walking in blinding, dark conditions for over six hours. CBC news reported Yash Patel telling the Minnesota jury, through a Gujarati interpreter, “I was very scared. I wanted to have help from somebody, but there was no one who could come and help me. It was so cold and I was alone. That was the reason I just kept on walking.” The report further stated that Patel told the jury that he “walked for hours in the dark before finally finding the van on the other side of the border and getting inside, where one of the other migrants and a man driving were waiting. The rest of the group from the house in Winnipeg eventually made it over as well and were all taken into custody by the Border Patrol agents”, but he “never saw the family again”.
According to the CBC report, Yash Patel is currently based in Chicago and working as a salesperson in a doughnut shop as he awaits the hearing in his own immigration case.
Modus operandi
As per a release from the US Attorney’s Office from the District of Minnesota, evidence presented during the trial had indicated that between December 12, 2021, and January 19, 2022, Harsh Patel and Shand “conspired to smuggle dozens of migrants across the border of Canada and into the United States”.
The release states, “Harsh Patel and Shand were part of a large-scale human-smuggling operation that brought Indian nationals to Canada on student visas and then smuggled them into the United States. (Their) roles in the smuggling operation included the coordination and transportation of people from Manitoba, Canada, into the United States. Specifically, Harsh Patel worked with co-conspirators in Canada to organise the logistics of smuggling trips, while Shand was instructed when and where to pick up migrants just south of the Canadian border in the United States. He then drove them to Chicago. They were paid for their roles in the conspiracy and disregarded the risks posed by the cold weather at the northern border.”
The release states that on January 19, 2022, Homeland Security Investigations (HSI) special agents responded to a request for assistance from the US Border Patrol (USBP) based out of Pembina, North Dakota. The USBP initiated a traffic stop on a white-colored, 15-passenger van that Shand was driving. “The stop occurred less than one mile south of the US-Canadian border in a rural area between the US ports of entry located at Lancaster, Minnesota, and Pembina. A short while later, law enforcement encountered five Indian nationals, approximately, a quarter mile south of the Canadian border walking in the direction of where Shand had just been arrested. They explained that they had walked across the border expecting to be picked up by someone. The group estimated they had been walking around for over seven hours…”