2 human traffickers get jail terms for Indian family's death at US-Canada border

A US court has sentenced an Indian-origin man and another person for human smuggling that resulted in the death of an Indian family of four, including two children.

The Indian family had frozen to death in January 2022 while attempting to illegally cross over from Canada to US. A blizzard had hit the area and temperatures plummeted to minus 36 degrees Celsius.

The US Department of Justice made public the details on Thursday. 

It said Harshkumar Ramanlal Patel, 29, an Indian national formerly of Florida, was sentenced to 10 years and one month in prison for his role in the conspiracy. Patel will be removed from the US following his sentence.

His co-conspirator, Steve Anthony Shand, 50, of Florida, was sentenced to six years and six months in prison followed by two years of supervised release.

The two were sentenced in District of Minnesota after being convicted at a jury trial for their roles in an international human smuggling conspiracy that resulted in the deaths of four Indian nationals, including a three-year-old and 11-year-old child, in January 2022, the US Department of Justice said.

On January 18 and 19, 2022, Patel and Shand, despite repeated warnings about the approaching blizzard, organised the smuggling of 11 people, including a family of four, from Canada into the US on foot in severe winter weather conditions.

In the early morning hours of January 19, a US Border Patrol agent found Shand’s van stuck in the snow and arrested him along with two illegal immigrants. Five more illegal immigrants emerged from the fields, including one suffering hypothermia.

Later that day, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) found the dead bodies of the family of four frozen in an isolated area on the Canadian side of the international border. The boy was wrapped in a blanket with his father’s frozen glove covering his face.

As proven at trial, Patel and Shand had been paid to smuggle the family into the United States, the Department of Justice said.

According to evidence presented at trial, Patel and Shand were part of a large-scale human-smuggling operation that brought Indian nationals to Canada on fraudulent student visas and then smuggled them into the United States across the northern border.

Patel organised the logistics of smuggling persons from Manitoba, Canada, into the US, with other co-conspirators, and Shand picked up the people just south of the Canadian border in the US and drove them to Chicago.

“Patel and Shand endangered thousands of lives for their personal enrichment and are responsible for the deaths of two small children who froze to death on their watch,” said Matthew R Galeotti, Head of the Justice Department’s Criminal Division.