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A jury on Friday convicted two men of people-smuggling charges for their roles in an international operation that led to the deaths of a family of Indian migrants who froze to death while trying to cross the Canada-U.S. border during a blizzard in 2022.
Harshkumar Ramanlal Patel, 29, an Indian national who prosecutors say went by the nickname “Dirty Harry,” and Steve Shand, 50, an American from Florida, were part of a sophisticated illegal operation that brought growing numbers of Indians to the U.S., prosecutors said.
They were each convicted of four counts related to people smuggling, including conspiracy to bring migrants into the country illegally.
“This trial exposed the unimaginable cruelty of human trafficking and those criminal organizations that value profit and greed more than humanity,” said Minnesota Attorney General Andy Luger.
“In order to make a few thousand dollars, these human traffickers put men, women and children in extreme danger resulting in horrible and tragic deaths of the whole family. Because of this unimaginable greed, a father, mother and two children froze to death in the underground – ground zero temperature on the Minnesota-Canada border,” Luger added.
The most serious counts of the indictment carry maximum sentences of up to 20 years in prison, the US attorney’s office told The Associated Press before the trial.
But federal sentencing guidelines rely on complicated formulas.
Luger said Friday that a variety of factors will be considered in determining the sentences prosecutors will recommend.
Federal prosecutors said 39-year-old Jagdish Patel; his wife, Vaishaliben, who was in her mid-30s; their 11-year-old daughter Vihangi; and three-year-old son, Dharmik, froze to death on January 19, 2022, while trying to cross the border into Minnesota as part of a plan orchestrated by Patel and Shand.
Patel is a common Indian surname and the victims were not related to Harshkumar Patel.
The couple was a teacher, local news reports say.
The family was quite well-off by local standards, living in a well-maintained two-story house with a yard and a wide veranda.
Experts say illegal immigration from India is fueled by everything from political repression to a dysfunctional U.S. immigration system that can take years, if not decades, to navigate legally.
Much of this is rooted in economics and how even low-wage jobs in the West can inspire hope for a better life.
Defense lawyers pitted against each other, with Shand’s team arguing that Patel had unwittingly drawn him into the scheme.
Bank records and witness statements of those who met Shand near the border did not link him to the crime, they added.
Prosecutors said Patel coordinated the operation while Shand was the driver. Shand was supposed to pick up 11 Indian migrants on the Minnesota side of the border, prosecutors said.
Only seven of them survived the crossing.
Canadian authorities found the Patel family dead from the cold later that morning.
The trial included an inside look at how the international smuggling ring allegedly operates and who it targets.
Rajinder Singh, 51, testified that he made over US$400,000 by smuggling more than 500 people through the same network that included Patel and Shand.
Singh said most of the people he smuggled came from the state of Gujarat. He said the migrants would often pay smugglers around US$100,000 to get them from India to the US, where they would work to pay off their debts at low-wage jobs in cities across the country.
Singh said the smugglers would run their finances through “hawala”, an informal system of money transfer that relies on trust.
The pipeline of illegal immigration from India has been around for a long time, but it has increased dramatically along the US-Canada border.
The U.S. Border Patrol arrested more than 14,000 Indians at the Canadian border in the year ended Sept. 30, accounting for 60 percent of all arrests along the border and more than 10 times the number two years ago.
The Pew Research Center estimates that by 2022, more than 725,000 Indians were living illegally in the US, behind only Mexicans and El Salvadorans.
Jamie Holt, Special Agent in Charge of Homeland Security Investigations, said this case is a stark reminder of the reality that victims of human trafficking face.
“People smuggling is a vile crime that preys on the most vulnerable, exploiting their desperation and dreams for a better life,” Holt said. “
The suffering this family has endured is unimaginable and it is our duty to ensure that such crimes are met with the full force of the law.”
One juror, Kevin Paul of Clearwater, Minnesota, told reporters afterward that it was difficult for jurors to see pictures of the family’s bodies.
He said he grew up in North Dakota and was familiar with the type of conditions that led to their deaths.
“It’s pretty brutal,” Paul said.
“I couldn’t imagine having to do what they had to do out there in the middle of nowhere.”
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