Survivor of harrowing blizzard walk across Canada-Minnesota border testifies in smuggling ring trial

FERGUS FALLS, Minn. – The van carrying 11 migrants from Winnipeg got stuck in the snow as a blizzard raged. Just north of the Canadian border, the driver told the group to get out and walk until they reached a second vehicle that would be waiting.

“He just said, ‘Keep moving straight,’” Yash Patel, one of the migrants, recalled to a federal jury on Wednesday through a Gujarati interpreter.

Patel had never even seen snow before his last few weeks in Canada; he was from the west Indian state of Gujarat known for its sweltering heat. He and the rest of the Gujarati migrants were totally unprepared for how brutal — and for four of them, deadly — their journey would become as the weather dropped to minus 33 degrees with windchill that night of Jan. 19, 2022.

“We couldn’t see anything,” said Patel. “It was snow all over.”

Patel’s testimony for the prosecution in the trial of accused smugglers Steve Shand and Harshkumar Patel offers the only first-person account of the migrants’ harrowing passage to the United States that spawned investigations across three countries. Yash Patel, who was 20 years old at the time, was one of the fortunate ones who made the trek unscathed. Jurors on Wednesday also saw photos of a migrant who suffered severe frostbite and pictures of the dead bodies of Jagdish Patel, 39; his wife Vaishaliben, 37; their daughter, Vihangi, 11; and son, Dharmik, 3, which were discovered just yards from the American border.

Yash Patel — who is not related to the victims or defendant — said that hours before the border crossing, a man brought him to a house in Winnipeg where six or seven other Gujaratis were staying. Someone brought a jacket, shoes and gloves for everyone and left. Authorities testified at the trial that the clothes were dangerously inadequate — Patel and most of the others were wearing bluejeans and rubber boots that lacked proper insulation.

That night, two men came to pick them up and drive them south to the border in a large van. Patel told the court that he noticed a family of four was already in the vehicle.

After 10 minutes, Patel testified, he realized he had become separated from the rest of the migrants. He estimated he continued walking for five or six hours in the dark.

“I was very scared,” said Patel. “I wanted to have help from somebody, but there was no one who could come and help me.”

Finally, he saw Shand’s 15-passenger van in the distance and climbed inside. Only one other migrant was in the van. By the time the Border Patrol showed up, Patel said he had gone to sleep. All three of them were detained.

Authorities said they soon came across five more migrants emerging from a field with the woman whom Patel had apparently seen in the Winnipeg house falling in and out of consciousness as she leaned on some of the men. The woman, soon identified as Priyanka Chaudhari, was rushed to a hospital in Hallock, Minn., where nurse practitioner Julie Johnson said her body temperature was so low it couldn’t be measured by a normal thermometer.

Johnson testified staff had to use a “cold weather” thermometer, which determined her temperature was 89.4 degrees. Normal body temperature is 98.6 degrees, and hypothermia occurs below 95 degrees. Chaudhari was so cold, the nurse recalled, Johnson had trouble finding her pulse.

The patient was swiftly airlifted to the burn unit at Regions Hospital in St. Paul. Jurors saw photos of Chaudhari with a dark red, bruised nose and bruised skin under her right eye from frostbite; her fingers were purple and enormously swollen.

Johnson said another migrant was taken to the hospital in Hallock with less serious injuries and that he also tested positive for COVID-19.

That afternoon, Pierre Demers of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police was called to the scene where Jagdish Patel’s family was found frozen in a field a few miles east of Emerson. He testified that he and his team took special vehicles that could navigate the heavy snow. They brought body bags.

“There was snow drifting over them. … Their faces were swollen,” Demers said.

The prosecution displayed photos of the scene: Jagdish Patel with his jacket unzipped and legs and arms spread out, covering his son Dharmik’s face with his own hand clad in a gray glove. Dharmik wrapped in a blue blanket printed with images of yellow ducks. Vihangi stretched out near them. Vaishaliben three-quarters of a mile away, slumped against a chain-link fence that encircled a natural gas facility — the only source of light in the area.

“The jacket [Jagdish] was wearing — was that suited to the environment they were in?” Assistant U.S. Attorney Michael McBride asked.

“No,” said Demers.

None of it was, according to Demers — not the jeans, not the boots, not the gloves, not even the blanket. Jagdish Patel’s gloves, he said, were “just a small type of glove for the fall weather.”

Authorities have described the group of migrants as victims of a smuggling network in which agents got them legal visas to Canada so they could then illegally cross into the U.S. Yash Patel said his grandfather’s friend arranged for him to come to the U.S. and that in late December 2021 he flew to Toronto, stayed there for a day, then flew to Vancouver using a ticket someone sent to him over WhatsApp. Patel said a man drove him to a house where he stayed for 10 or 15 days alone. Then Patel was ordered to fly back to Toronto, where he stayed in a motel for two days by himself before a man drove him to the house in Winnipeg, a distance of more than 2,000 miles.

“I did ask [what was going on] … they just told me, ‘Whatever we are saying, you have to do that,’” Patel told the court.

Yet the witness repeatedly evaded questions by defense attorney Lisa Lopez about whether his intention when he left India was to illegally enter into the U.S.

“I had to study in Canada,” claimed Patel, who along with most of the migrants had received a Canadian student visa.

“Are you testifying under oath that when you left India, your intention was not to come to the United States illegally?” asked Lopez, who represents Shand.

“They told me that I have to study in Canada only,” Patel insisted.

But he testified that he never enrolled in school there. Patel was in Canada for only a few weeks before crossing into America. Patel said he has been living in Chicago since the incident and now works as a cashier at a Dunkin’ Donuts.

A spokesperson for the U.S. Attorney’s Office declined to comment when asked by the Minnesota Star Tribune if Patel would receive a T-visa, a type of immigration status that can make a noncitizen eligible for permanent residence if he is a victim of trafficking and assists law enforcement in the prosecution. Patel told the court that he has applied for asylum and that he’s trying to stay in the U.S. “because I have a problem in India.”