‘People will die’: Testimony showed repeated warnings about perilous Canadian border crossing

The U.S. Border Patrol agent had just found two young migrants and a Florida man he believed had picked them up after they illegally crossed the Canadian border.

It was so dangerously cold that the agent, Christopher Oliver, needed to know whether anyone else was lost in the fields of northwestern Minnesota. He directed his plea to one of the migrants who seemed to have a better knowledge of English.

“If you don’t tell us how many people are there,” Oliver said, “people will die.”

The 20-year-old man from India told him there was no one else.

Oliver posed the same question to Steve Shand, the American he had stopped on the U.S. side of the border in a large van that seemed suspiciously out of place in a sparsely traveled area miles from Interstate 29. Shand had told the agent he got lost on his way to see friends in Winnipeg and that the migrants in the van had walked up and pounded on the vehicle’s windows, asking to be let in.

“People will die if you don’t tell us the truth,” Oliver said.

Shand, he later testified, repeated what the migrant said: No one else was there.

That was false. More than six hours later, authorities found four bodies in the snow.

A federal court jury in Fergus Falls on Friday convicted Shand and Harshkumar Patel — whom authorities said paid Shand to pick up the migrants at the border — for their roles in a smuggling network in which people in Gujarat, India, paid agents to help them enter Canada on student visas so they could then illegally cross into the U.S.

More than three days of testimony in the trial revealed an increasingly perilous scheme, and one in which people involved missed chances to try to save lives.

Patel was himself an unauthorized Gujarati immigrant who, according to his lawyer, had come to America for a better life. He met Shand, a struggling cab driver, at a casino and hired him to pick up Gujaratis near the international border with Minnesota and North Dakota in December 2021 and take them to Chicago.

On the first pickup, Shand messaged his wife, Stephanie Brown, that the temperature was 16 degrees. “That’s messed up,” she texted back.

“They going to die before they get here,” he replied.

“For real,” she agreed.

But days later, Shand chose to make a second trip to the border from Orlando, near where he and Patel lived. At the airport in Grand Forks, N.D., he rented a Nissan Sentra.

“Same time tonight 9:30?” he messaged Patel on Dec. 21. “Yeah,” Patel responded.

Shand made a third trip on Dec. 27, flying from Orlando to the Twin Cities, where he texted Patel that he was trying to find a seven-seater. He wound up renting an Acura RDX at Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport. The following afternoon, he messaged Patel: “It’s -9 degrees. Make sure everyone is [warm].”

Authorities later found that Shand had used Google to translate from English to Hindi that a woman in the party might be hypothermic.

“Did Patel or Shand call this trip off?” Assistant U.S. Attorney Michael McBride asked a Homeland Security Investigations special agent on the witness stand. “Not at all,” said the agent, Manuel Jimenez.

On Jan. 8, 2022, Shand texted Brown with what seemed to be a reference to a proposed payment from Patel.

“He said 8000,” he wrote. “For what?” she asked.

“For the trip. For us.”

“For 15.”

“Yes. What do you think?” She said it was cheap.

Yet two days later, Shand boarded a flight from Orlando to the Twin Cities, rented a Ford Transit and headed to the border. Brown sent Shand an attachment that the temperature was 2 degrees in Winnipeg.

Records presented at the trial showed that Brown flew to the Manitoba capital on Jan. 11, rented a car and returned to Orlando a day later. Prosecutors said that suggested she had dropped off migrants on the Canadian side of the border.

Witnesses described a few Indian nationals as driving the operation, and Shand appeared to be a comparatively minor player. But prosecutors argued the network relied on every member doing their job.

It hadn’t been common to see signs of smuggling in the area. But starting in late December 2021, Oliver of the Border Patrol was on the lookout after finding a trail of footprints in the snow that suggested at least five people had crossed the border. Nearby tire tracks indicated someone had picked them up, and a backpack with a price tag in Indian rupees was found.

On Jan. 17, Shand flew into the Twin Cities again and drove north.

“Be careful driving tonight,” his friend in Fargo texted him the next night, attaching a blizzard advisory. “Hopefully it will not be as bad as they say. But just watch it.”

“I know but it’s what it is,” Shand replied.

“Exactly!! You were here to make money!” the friend said.

Evidence at the trial indicated that Patel paid Shand and Brown a total of $36,000.

Shand forwarded the weather warning to Patel just before 7 p.m. and told him to ensure everyone was dressed for blizzard conditions.

At almost 1 a.m., Shand texted Patel a video of snow blowing across the road as he drove. “Damn,” Patel replied.

“Now you know what I’m dealing with,” Shand wrote.

They exchanged calls, and Patel dropped a pin with a location, saying, “When ever you at the spot let me know.”

But Shand’s 15-passenger van got stuck in the snow, and the men exchanged panicked messages.

“Still stuck,” Shand texted him at 3:17 a.m. “Ohh my god,” said Patel. “Do something please.”

Patel gave him two numbers to call with Toronto area codes, but Shand did not appear to reach anybody. Patel asked Shand to turn his vehicle lights on and off so “that [the migrants] can see.”

“I’m doing it,” Shand said at 3:41 a.m.

“If they come let me know,” Patel wrote. He urged him, “Try to go over there,” apparently meaning the pickup point.

Hours passed. Shand was still stuck. “Don’t see anyone,” he said after 4 a.m. More hours went by.

“All good?” Patel asked him at 7:33 a.m. “No no one yet,” Shand replied.

Shand texted his wife that he was still waiting on roadside assistance.

“You got anymore ppl?” Brown asked. “No,” he replied.

By then, two migrants had reached the van. One sat in the passenger’s seat and another in the back. Oliver would later observe that the migrants had taken off their socks and boots as they warmed up.

Troy Larson, a technician at a nearby natural gas pipeline compressor station, noticed a van in a ditch on his way to start his 7 a.m. shift. He returned with a tractor to pull out the vehicle, turning down Shand’s offer of $40 for the help.

No one told Larson about any other people out in the cold. Had he known, Larson said, he would have gone out looking and called for help.

Patel used an expletive in a text at 8:46 a.m., directing Shand to “go over there” and search the entire road. He sent Shand a map with a yellow circle around the place where he wanted him to look.

Oliver said he was in the area that morning to look for further evidence of border crossings and to help any people who hadn’t made it after the snowstorm. He pulled up to a 15-passenger van with two people who appeared to be of Indian origin inside and began questioning the driver — Shand.

Oliver checked the passengers’ passports and saw no evidence of legal entry. He called other Border Patrol officers for help and told Shand he was under arrest.

The agent set off for the Border Patrol station in Pembina, N.D., to process the two migrants, while another patrol officer followed with Shand. But as word arrived of five more migrants walking in the fields, they sped back north.

One Border Patrol agent said he saw a woman, who was later identified as Priyanka Chaudhari, draped against other migrants for support and partly conscious. Oliver testified that when he tried to open the door of the vehicle where Chaudhari was being stabilized, she “basically fell out.”

He stayed with her in the back of the vehicle as another officer drove them to meet an ambulance. The woman’s breathing became extremely shallow and slow; her eyes closed and her breathing stopped. As Oliver rubbed his knuckles on her chest and yelled, her eyes would open and she’d loudly gasp, again and again.

“Don’t go to sleep!” he shouted. “Stay awake!”

With the vehicle’s heat on full blast, Chaudhari began groaning in pain.

“Let me know you’re still alive,” he said, urging her to squeeze his hand. “Just let me know you’re alive.”

Oliver said Chaudhari’s hand “felt like a chicken breast taken out of the freezer — it was just rock solid cold.” She was airlifted to the burn unit at Regions Hospital in St. Paul and survived.

Border Patrol agent Daniel Huguley found a backpack left by a migrant in his vehicle. Inside were diapers and children’s clothes. He and others went back out and began searching for anyone else who might be stranded in the snow.

By then, Rajinder Pal Singh of California, who was later convicted in another smuggling case, said he was receiving phone calls from a counterpart in Canada. They were from Fenil Patel, who had arranged the migrants’ passage to the border and has since been charged by Indian authorities.

Singh testified that Patel said a family of four migrants in the group had called him during their trek to the border to say they were too cold to continue. But he said he did not follow through on his assurance that he would pick them up or send someone else.

Prosecutors say that Shand and Harshkumar Patel didn’t call emergency services either. It wasn’t until at least 3:30 p.m. that the Royal Canadian Mounted Police found the frozen bodies of Jagdish Patel, 39; his wife Vaishaliben, 37; their daughter Vihangi, 11; and their son Dharmik, 3. They lay just yards from the border.