Nov. 18 (UPI) — The trial of two Florida men charged with attempting to smuggle a migrant family from India before they froze to death at the U.S.-Canada border has gotten underway.
On Monday, jury selection began nearly three years after the bodies of Jagdish Patel, 39, and his wife, Vaishaliben, 37, 11-year-old daughter Vihangi and 3-year-old son Dharmik were found dead in Manitoba, Canada, as they tried to cross the border in the middle of a freezing blizzard roughly -9 degrees Fahrenheit on Jan. 19, 2022.
The two men from Florida, Steve Shand and Harshkumar Patel — of no relation to the victims — have been charged with multiple counts of human smuggling. Both pleaded not guilty.
The trial, likely to last roughly five days, was expected to take place near the closest federal courthouse in Fergus Falls less than 50 miles southeast of Fargo, N.D. Meanwhile, jurors were selected from all over Minnesota.
The deceased Patel family was part of a group of 11 natives of India all attempting to make their way to start a new life in a different country.
The Royal Canadian Mounted Police found the four bodies roughly 13 yards from the U.S. border frozen to death with the father still holding his young son wrapped in a blanket.
In February, Patel was arrested in Chicago. Shand, meanwhile, was arrested on Jan. 19, 2022, by U.S. border patrol agents on a Minnesota highway near Emerson just south of Canada’s border.
According to prosecutors, Harshkumar Patel — who went by the alias “Dirty Harry” — allegedly hired and paid Shand to meet and transport migrants once they crossed the border into the United States in coordination with Canadian co-conspirators. A string of text messages between the two men acknowledged the dangerous weather conditions at the time of the attempted illegal crossing.
Prosecutors said Shand had received about $25,000 from Patel, who would determine dates and numbers of migrants to cross the border. Shand would fly from Orlando, Fla., to Minneapolis, Minn., to rent cars to travel to the northern border.
A court brief last month outlined how the two men supposedly smuggled dozens of other individuals across the border as part of a “large, systemic human smuggling operation,” according to court documents, that brought in nationals of India to Canada on student visas who then were illegally taken to the U.S.
Jagdish Patel and his family hailed from the middle-class village of Dingucha from the state of Gujarat in west India, which is an area where many U.S.-Indian citizens have immigrated from since at least the 1960s. Harshkumar Patel, the family’s alleged smuggler, came from the same Indian state.
Officials claimed Patel, the alleged smuggler, was previously denied a U.S. visa five times and ultimately appeared to have arrived illegally through Canada. He had been managing a strip mall casino in Orange City where he met Shand, who was a taxi driver in the Florida community where the two men allegedly met.
According to the U.S. Border Patrol, fiscal year 2024 saw an estimated 198,929 encounters with migrants at the Canadian border.
Officials said the large part of illegal crossing encounters happen at the borders at New York, Vermont and New Hampshire and some parts of the midwest region like Grand Forks and Minnesota where the deadly incident transpired.
In May, Renville County, N.D. Sheriff Roger Hutchinson told lawmakers in congressional testimony there exists a lack of border agents in the Grand Forks region, saying how agents deal with such things like dead, bodies, high-speed pursuits, damaged farm crops, illegal substances, counterfeit items among other things.
The sheriff said most of the migrants agents see are from either Nigeria in Africa, Romania in eastern Europe or from India.
“Our biggest concern is who we did not catch,” Hutchinson said. “We have a wide-open, vast border, with no natural physical barriers and very few man-made ones.”