Trial witness describes vast smuggling network that brought migrant family who froze to death to America

FERGUS FALLS, MINN. – As an Indian migrant family struggled to cross the border during a brutally cold blizzard, they made desperate phone calls to the alleged smuggler who had arranged their passage from Canada.

The migrants told the alleged smuggler, Fenil Patel, that they couldn’t find the driver who was supposed to pick them up on the U.S. side of the border and that they were too cold in the early morning hours of Jan. 19, 2022. As the weather dropped to minus 33 degrees with the windchill, they told Patel their children, ages 11 and 3, could not stand the weather and they did not have enough clothes to keep warm.

Patel told the migrants to come back to the Canadian side and that he would pick them up or send someone for them, concerned they would get arrested on American soil where they didn’t have a visa. But no one came, and the migrants were found frozen to death hours later.

That was the testimony of cooperating witness and convicted West Coast smuggler Rajinder Pal Singh in U.S. District Court on Tuesday, as prosecutors laid out their case against two other men they say were involved in the enterprise, Harshkumar Patel and Steve Shand. One major question: Just who is legally responsible, and to what extent, for the deaths of Jagdish Patel, 39; his wife, Vaishaliben, 37; and their children, Vihangi, 11; and Dharmik, 3.

Patel is a common name in the western Indian state of Gujarat and the victims and alleged smugglers — all from that region — are not related.

Gujarati police charged Fenil Patel in connection with the deaths of the Patel family in January 2023. An investigation by Canadian media outlet CBC News in January 2024 found that Fenil Patel has been openly living in a suburb of Toronto. He faces no charges in the U.S.

In Minnesota, prosecutors called Singh to testify about the larger smuggling operation that spurred the fatal journey of Jagdish Patel’s family. Singh, from the Indian state of Punjab, illegally entered the U.S. at least three times, serving prison twice for fraud and returning without legal permission after being repeatedly deported.

He pleaded guilty in Seattle in February 2023 to transporting and harboring migrants for profit and conspiracy to commit money laundering, admitting he received more than $500,000 as a key member of a smuggling ring that brought hundreds of Indians across the Canadian border to Washington state. Singh, who said he smuggled more than 500 people into America over the years, was not charged in connection with the Patel family’s deaths and testified that he only handled border crossings from British Columbia.

Singh testified on Tuesday that he joined the smuggling trade in 2015 and began working with Fenil Patel, a longtime resident of Canada he said was the person who arranged for Indians to get Canadian student visas. He would then send the migrants from Toronto to British Columbia and Singh and another smuggling partner helped them cross into Washington. He said agents in India charge people $100,000 to be smuggled into the U.S.

Singh said he had some rules about smuggling out of safety concerns: He didn’t deal with crossing water or snow and would not smuggle pregnant women, children or the elderly. He said he and Fenil Patel used a series of prepaid phones and directed migrants to download tracking software on their phones before crossing so smugglers would know their location.

Jagdish Patel’s family was part of a larger party of 11 Gujarati migrants, some of whom Singh said that Fenil Patel originally arranged to be flown from Toronto to British Columbia. Singh said mudslides and floods in his region in late 2021 stopped his work there, and Fenil Patel directed him to have the migrants flown back to him and Patel said he would have them cross into the U.S. from Manitoba instead.

“He said he [had] the connections in Minnesota,” said Singh.

But Singh said he had never met or spoken with the two defendants sitting in the courtroom.

Singh seemed to offer conflicting accounts of whether the operation had worked with someone who fit Shand’s description. Shand is of Jamaican descent. Singh testified Patel once mentioned a man from Jamaica during a call, but upon cross-examination said that he and Fenil Patel had never worked with a Jamaican.

The witness also said that Fenil Patel had at one point sent him a photo of Harshkumar Patel. Singh claimed that his British Columbia smuggling partner had secured the defendant a fake driver’s license at Fenil Patel’s direction.

Singh, who was living in the Sacramento, Calif., area, said he woke up the morning of Jan. 19, 2022 to many missed calls from Fenil Patel.

“When I called him back, he said, ‘Our work got screwed up. … All the people got caught,’” Singh testified.

At the time, he said, they didn’t know anyone had died. But he claimed that Fenil Patel had lied to the Patel family that someone would come pick them up on the Canadian side, fearing that if they got arrested on U.S. soil they would get deported and the smuggling route would “go bad.”

“He lied to the family while they were out in the cold,” said Singh.

He said that after the surviving migrants of the group were released and placed in a hotel, Fenil Patel was still worried about moving them to Chicago, which was where Shand was supposed to take them before he got arrested.

Shand’s attorney, Aaron Morrison, noted the Department of Homeland Security was recording Singh’s calls at the time — he was already under federal investigation for smuggling. Singh was criminally charged in May 2022, and said he hasn’t talked to Fenil Patel since. He was sentenced to 45 months in prison, but said he received six months off his sentence when he provided information on human smuggling after a Gujarati family of four drowned in the St. Lawrence River while illegally trying to cross into New York.

Some of the information was also used to charge Harshkumar Patel in Minnesota. Singh is receiving “deferred action” from deportation while he assists with the case and said he’s afraid to go back to India because Fenil Patel’s people may harm him.

While the defense noted he had a track record of being deceptive, Singh said he was choosing to testify because “that’s the right thing to do, first of all. And I was charged with human smuggling as well, but they’re playing with people’s lives. People died.”

Singh is scheduled to resume his testimony in Fergus Falls on Wednesday.