FERGUS FALLS – A judge in Minnesota has sentenced a man to 10 years for his role in a human smuggling operation that saw a family freeze to death in southern Manitoba near the Canada-U.S. border.
Harshkumar Patel, wearing an orange prison jumpsuit, did not address the court.
A co-accused in the case, Steve Shand, was to be sentenced later Wednesday.
Judge John Tunheim described the crimes as “extraordinarily serious.”
A jury convicted the two men last fall on four charges related to bringing people illegally into the United States from Canada.
The trial was told that during one operation in 2022, a couple from India and their two children were sent walking across the border in an overnight blizzard.
Their bodies were later found in a field metres from the border.
Court heard Patel organized the logistics of the smuggling trips, while Shand picked up migrants on the U.S. side in rented vehicles and drove them to cities including Chicago.
Prosecutors recommended Patel be sentenced to 19 years in prison and that Shand should get 10 years.
A lawyer representing Patel lawyer, Thomas Leinenweber, said he would be appealing the conviction.
During the trial, Patel’s lawyers argued he had been misidentified and there is no evidence he was near the border.
The jury heard the men were involved in several smuggling trips between Manitoba and Minnesota in December 2021 and January 2022, in which people from India were brought to Canada on student visas then sent on foot across the border to the U.S.
On the day of the deadly trek, the temperature was -23 C and the wind chill had dipped below -35.
One migrant testified he and others in a group were driven to an area in Manitoba near the border and told to walk in a straight line in the dark until they came to a van on the U.S. side. They were dressed in hats, jackets, gloves and boots designed for mild weather.
The group got separated in the driving snow. Some made it to Shand’s van after walking for hours, including one whose hypothermia was so bad she was flown to Minneapolis for treatment.
Hours after that, the frozen bodies of Jagdish Patel, 39; his wife Vaishaliben Patel, 37; their 11-year-old daughter, Vihangi; and their three-year-old son, Dharmik, were found in a field in Manitoba just metres from the border. They were dressed in jeans and light jackets, and the boy’s body was still in his father’s arms.
Vaishaliben Patel’s body was found away from the rest of the family, up against a chain-link fence near an unmanned natural gas facility. Prosecutors said it appears she had left her family to try to find help at the only building in sight that night.
Patel is a common name in India, and the family was not related to the accused.
Shand’s lawyers said he was simply a taxi driver who was offered money by Harshkumar Patel to pick people up in different locations and was unaware he was doing anything wrong until the day of his arrest.
A jury found the men guilty on all the charges they faced. After the verdict, U.S. Attorney Andrew Luger said it was a case of “unthinkable cruelty” in which the men valued money more than people’s lives.
This report by The Canadian Press was first published May 28, 2025.
