MINNEAPOLIS– On the last night of their lives, Jagdish Patel, his wife and their two young children tried to sneak into the U.S. across a nearly empty stretch of the Canadian border.
Wind chills reached minus 36 Fahrenheit (minus 38 degrees Celsius) that night in January 2022 as the family left India on foot to meet a waiting van. They walked amid vast fields and thick snowdrifts, navigating in the darkness of a nearly moonless night.
The driverwaiting in northern Minnesota, his boss sent a message: “Make sure everyone is dressed for the snowstorm conditions.”
According to federal prosecutors, the coordination of the cases in Canada was the case Harshkumar Patelan experienced smuggler nicknamed ‘Dirty Harry’. Stateside, Steve Shand, the driver recently recruited by Patel, was at a casino near their Florida homes, prosecutors say.
The two men, whose trial begins Monday, are accused of being part of a sophisticated human smuggling operation that is feeding a fast-growing population of Indians living illegally in the US. pleaded not guilty.
During the five weeks the two worked together, prosecutors’ documents allege they often spoke of the bitter cold as they smuggled five groups of Indians across that quiet stretch of border.
“16 degrees cold as hell,” Shand reported on an earlier trip. “Will they still be alive when they get here?”
During the last trip, on January 19, 2022, Shand would pick up eleven more Indian migrants, including the Patels. Only seven survived.
Canadian authorities found the Patels later that morningdead from the cold.
In the frozen arms of Jagdish Patel lay the body of his three-year-old son Dharmik, wrapped in a blanket.
The narrow streets of Dingucha, a quiet village in the western Indian state of Gujarat, are full of advertisements for moving abroad.
“Make your dream of going abroad come true,” says one poster, listing three tempting destinations: “Canada. Australia. USA.”
This is where the family’s deadly journey began.
Jagdish Patel, 39, grew up in Dingucha. He and his wife Vaishaliben, who was in her mid-30s, lived with his parents and raised their 11-year-old daughter Vihangi and Dharmik. (Patel is a common Indian surname and they are not related to Harshkumar Patel.) The couple were teachers, local news reports say.
The family was fairly wealthy by local standards and lived in a well-maintained two-story house with a front patio and wide veranda.
“It was not a lavish life,” said Vaibhav Jha, a local reporter who spent days in the village. “But there was no urgency, no desperation.”
Experts say illegal immigration from India is driven by everything from political repression to a dysfunctional U.S. immigration system that could take years, if not decades, to navigate legally.
But much of it is rooted in economics, and how even low-paid jobs in the West can fuel hope for a better life.
That hope changed Dingucha.
Today, so many villagers – legally and otherwise – have moved abroad that blocks of houses stand empty and the social media feeds of those who remain are filled with old neighbors showing off houses and cars.
That drives even more people to leave.
“There was so much pressure in the village, where people grew up wanting the good life,” Jha said.
Smuggling rings were happy to help, charging fees of up to $90,000 per person. In Dingucha, Jha said, many families were able to finance that by selling farmland.
Satveer Chaudhary is a Minneapolis immigration attorney who has helped migrants exploited by motel owners, many of them Gujarati.
Smugglers with ties to the Gujarati business community have built an underground network, he said, bringing in workers willing to do low- or even no-paying jobs.
“Their own community took advantage of them,” Chaudhary said.
The pipeline of illegal immigration from India is long-standing, but has increased sharply along the US-Canada border. U.S. Border Patrol arrested more than 14,000 Indians at the Canadian border in the year ended September 30, accounting for 60% of all arrests along that border and more than 10 times the number two years ago.
According to Pew Research Center estimates, there were more than 725,000 Indians living illegally in the US in 2022, 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 never even reach court.
With so many Indians trying to reach the US, the smuggling networks see no need to warn customers.
They “tell people it is very easy to enter the US. They never tell them about the dangers involved,” Thakor said.
U.S. prosecutors allege Patel and Shand were part of an elaborate operation that involved people seeking business in India, obtaining Canadian student visas, arranging transportation and smuggling migrants into the U.S., usually through Washington state or Minnesota.
On Monday, Patel, 29, and Shand, 50, will each face four charges related to human trafficking at the federal courthouse in Fergus Falls, Minnesota.
Patel’s attorney, Thomas Leinenweber, told The Associated Press that his client came to America to escape poverty and build a better life and “is now wrongly accused of participating in this terrible crime.”
Shand’s attorney did not return a call seeking comment. Prosecutors say Shand told investigators that Patel paid him about $25,000 for the five trips.
However, his last passengers never made it.
At 3 a.m. on January 19, 2022, the eleven Indian migrants had wandered for hours in the snowstorms and brutal cold in search of Shand. Many wore jeans and rubber work boots. No one was wearing serious winter clothes.
However, Shand was stuck. Prosecutors allege he was heading to the pickup site in a rented 15-passenger van when he drove into a ditch about half a mile (0.8 kilometers) from the border.
Eventually, two migrants came across the van. Some time later, a passing employee of a pipeline company pulled the vehicle out of the ditch.
Shortly afterwards, a U.S. Border Patrol agent, who was on guard for migrants after shoe prints were found at the border, stopped Shand.
Shand repeatedly insisted that no one else was outside, even as five more desperate Indians walked from the fields to the vehicle, including one who was going in and out of consciousness.
They had walked for more than 11 hours.
There were no children among the migrants, but one man had a backpack filled with toys, children’s clothes and diapers. He said a family of four Indians asked him to hold it because they had to carry their son.
Sometime during the night they had become separated.
Hours later, the Patels’ bodies were found just inside Canada, in a field near where the migrants crossed into the US.
Jagdish held Dharmik, with daughter Vihangi nearby. Vaishaliben was a short walk away.
Hemant Shah, an Indian-born businessman who lives in Winnipeg, about 70 miles north of where the migrants were found, helped organize a virtual prayer service for the Patels.
He is used to harsh winters and cannot fathom the suffering they have endured.
“How could these people even think about crossing the border?” said Shah.
Greed, he said, had cost four lives: “There was no humanity.”
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Foley reported from Iowa City, Iowa. Associated Press writers Elliot Spagat in San Diego, Sheikh Saaliq in New Delhi, Tim Sullivan in Minneapolis and Ajit Solanki in Dingucha, India, contributed to this report.