Jury to decide fate of two men charged with the cold-weather deaths of family found at Canada-Minnesota border in 2022

FERGUS FALLS, MINN. – Two men on trial for their alleged roles in a human smuggling network on the Canadian border knew that 11 migrants from India were at risk from the cold but never called off plans to cross them into the U.S. or even phoned for help on their behalf after most of the group got lost for hours in a blizzard, a prosecutor told the jury on Thursday.

While the migrants were “slowly dying in the freezing cold, Steve Shand sat in his warm van and did nothing to help,” said Assistant U.S. Attorney Michael McBride in his closing arguments. “Harshkumar Patel texted from sunny Florida and did nothing to help. For weeks, they knew the cold would kill, but they decided their profit was more important than these human lives.”

As a result, McBride said, a family of four froze to death in the snow on Jan. 19, 2022.

After three days of testimony, jurors will start deliberations Friday in the trial of Patel and Shand on counts of conspiring to bring unauthorized immigrants to the U.S. and transport them, causing serious bodily injury and placing lives in jeopardy.

The jury will also determine the defendants’ guilt on charges of attempted transportation of aliens into the country for commercial advantage or private financial gain, and whether they aided and abetted that crime.

In their final arguments Thursday, defense attorneys lamented the tragedy that befell Jagdish Patel, 39; his wife Vaishaliben, 37; their daughter Vihangi, 11, and son Dharmik, 3. But they urged jurors to be critical of witnesses with shifting testimony, prosecutors jumping to conclusions without sufficient evidence, and the culpability of other players.

Jurors heard testimony earlier in the week from convicted West Coast smuggler Rajinder Pal Singh that Fenil Patel, an Indian national who lives in Toronto and was charged by Indian police for the family’s deaths, had arranged for the migrants to get Canadian visas so they could illegally cross into the U.S.

Defense lawyer Aaron Morrison said there was a conspiracy among Fenil Patel, Singh and Harshkumar Patel and that they used his client, Shand. (Patel is a common name in India, and the defendants and victims are not related.)

Morrison emphasized that his client had always used his real name and ID when booking flights from near his home in Orlando to Minneapolis and renting cars that he drove to northern Minnesota. He described Shand, a Jamaican American who spent his life in warm climates, as clueless — not only about the migrant transport jobs from the border area to Chicago that prosecutors said Harshkumar Patel paid him to do, but also about cold weather.

Shand owned a taxi business and saw the jobs as a business opportunity, Morrison said. The attorney said Shand may have been stupid and naïve, but the government hadn’t proved beyond a reasonable doubt that he knew he was doing anything illegal.

Tom Plunkett, an attorney for Harshkumar Patel, said Shand wasn’t duped into participating. He pointed to evidence that Shand’s wife had flown to Winnipeg and rented a car — the government claimed she took migrants to the border — on dates that aligned with what prosecutors said was an earlier crossing handled by Shand on the Minnesota side.

All sides agree that Harshkumar Patel, then a Florida resident, was never near the border during the five migrant crossings prosecutors say he hired Shand to do. Plunkett argued that the government hadn’t presented any surveillance video of his client’s involvement in the alleged conspiracy.

While Plunkett disputed that there was any real proof that his client is the same person linked to the contact and messages in Shand’s phone, the prosecution presented evidence showing that Harshkumar Patel had used that number on other records, including a key immigration application.

McBride pointed the jury to text messages in the weeks before the fatal border crossing in which Shand asked Patel how many “boxes” there would be, in what he said was code for migrants.

“Above-board taxi services don’t refer to their clients as boxes,” said McBride. “You hide what you’re driving when you know what you’re doing is against the law.”

Prosecutors presented a trove of records showing airline tickets, car rentals, text messages and deposits that Patel made into Shand’s bank account after completing each job. Plunkett said the prosecution hadn’t proved that Patel himself had financially benefited, but prosecutors showed that he stopped using the bank account he had been using to pay Shand the day that Shand was arrested and that he also immediately got a new phone.

Jurors heard testimony this week that Shand was heading to the Minnesota-Manitoba border on Jan. 18, texting his co-defendant that the people he was picking up should be dressed for an expected blizzard. By the early hours of Jan. 19, he was stuck in the snow, and only two migrants had made it to his van.

A U.S. Border Patrol agent who stopped Shand said he was told “no” when he asked if other people were out there. Shand’s attorney argued that he was flashing his lights so that the migrants could find him and calling numbers that Harshkumar Patel had sent him. But Shand, unlike Patel, didn’t have numbers for the migrants or for Fenil Patel, the key contact on the Canadian side.

In his testimony, Singh laid blame for the migrant deaths on Fenil Patel, who hasn’t been charged. Morrison on Thursday asked a Homeland Security investigations special agent on the stand whether anybody had attempted to interview Fenil Patel about the case.

“I don’t believe that was an option, and I don’t believe that’s an option for right now,” said the agent, Manuel Jimenez.

“You didn’t even want to try?” asked Morrison. “A man who left a family of four to die, you didn’t think it might be a good idea to go talk to him or try to talk to him or charge him with a crime?”

“I completely understand that, and that’s what we’re working towards.”

In his closing arguments, Morrison told the jury that none of the migrants had been forced to get out of a van in Manitoba that night to cross into the U.S. He put some of the blame on the family that died.

“The government wants you to be upset because [Jagdish Patel’s] family wanted to come to America,” said Morrison. “They also played a part in the tragedy that happened. That’s just the truth, and Mr. Shand isn’t charged with forcing them to come across the border, forcing them to get out of a van … forcing them to get on the plane in India.”