Do you feel lucky, punk?
An accused human smuggler nicknamed “Dirty Harry” is set to stand trial Monday for the deaths of an Indian family with two young children, including a 3-year-old, who froze to death trying to cross the northern border into the US.
School teachers Jagdish Patel and his wife Vaishaliben, along with their 11-year-old daughter Vihangi and 3-year-old son Dharmik, attempted to walk across the US-Canadian border with a group of other migrants in temperatures as low as minus 36 degrees Fahrenheit on Jan. 19, 2022 — a treacherous journey allegedly coordinated by defendant Harshkumar Patel and a cohort.
Only seven of the 11 migrants in the group crossing into Minnesota from Canada were found alive. The Patel family was found dead by Canadian authorities — with the dad discovered clutching his 3-year-old son, who was wrapped in a blanket.
Harshkumar, 29, known as “Dirty Harry,” after acting icon Clint Eastwood’s cutthroat character in the Hollywood movie franchise, is accused of coordinating the dangerous crossings with the help of Steven Shand, 49.
Harshkumar, no relation to the doomed Patel family, stood guard on the Canadian side of the border and Shand on the US side, according to prosecutors. The two pleaded not guilty to four counts of human smuggling each last year.
Shand is set to stand trial along with Harshkumar on Monday at the federal courthouse in Fergus Falls, Minn.
Harshkumar and Shand, both of Deltona, Fla., often spoke about the bitter cold as they smuggled five groups of Indian migrants over several weeks past the quiet stretch of the snowy Canadian border, documents from prosecutors allege.
“16 degrees cold as hell,” Shand messaged Harshkumar during an earlier trip. “They going to be alive when they get here?”
Harshkumar is said to have recruited Shand at a casino near their homes in Deltona, just north of Orlando.
US prosecutors allege Harshkumar and Shand were part of a sprawling operation that smuggles Indian migrants into the US, mostly into Washington state or Minnesota.
The fated January 2022 group of 11 Indian migrants, including the Patels, walked through vast farm fields and bulky snowdrifts, navigating in the black of an almost moonless night, to try to illegally breach the border.
Shand was allegedly waiting for the group in northern Minnesota and messaged his boss: “Make sure everyone is dressed for the blizzard conditions, please,” according to court records.
Along the way, the family of four succumbed to the deadly conditions. Many of the migrants who were crossing with them were in jeans and rubber work boots. None wore heavy winter clothing.
Shand meanwhile had been heading to the pickup spot in a rented 15-passenger van when he drove into a ditch roughly a half-mile from the border, prosecutors allege.
Eventually, two migrants stumbled across the van. Sometime later, a passing pipeline company worker pulled the vehicle from the ditch.
Soon after that, a US Border Patrol agent, who was on the watch for illegal migrants after bootprints were found near the border, pulled over Shand.
Shand repeatedly insisted he wasn’t waiting for anyone else, even as five more desperate Indians wandered to the vehicle from the fields, including one going in and out of consciousness.
They had been walking for more than 11 hours.
There were no children among the surviving 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 young son.
The man told US authorities he paid the equivalent of about $87,000 to get smuggled into the country.
Sometime in the night, the Patels had become separated from the others. Hours later, their bodies were found still inside Canada.
Jagdish Patel, 39, grew up in Dingucha, India. He and his wife, Vaishaliben, who was in her mid-30s, lived with his parents, raising their children.
The couple were schoolteachers, local news reports say.
Experts say illegal immigration from India is driven by everything from political repression to a dysfunctional American immigration system that can take years, if not decades, to navigate legally.
The pipeline of illegal immigration from India has long existed but has increased sharply in recent years along the U.S.-Canada border. The US Border Patrol arrested more than 14,000 Indians on the Canadian border in the year ending Sept. 30, which amounted to 60% of all arrests along that border for the 12 months period and more than 10 times the annual number two years ago.
By 2022, the Pew Research Center estimates there were more than 725,000 Indians living illegally in the US, behind Mexicans and El Salvadorans.
Hemant Shah, an Indian-born businessman living in Winnipeg, about 70 miles north of where the migrants were found, helped organize a virtual prayer service for the Patels.
“How could these people have even thought about going and crossing the border?” Shah said.
Greed had taken four lives, he said.
“There was no humanity.”
With Post wires
