ILLEGAL MIGRANTS - This family. An Indian couple with children, at the Northern border, looking for a better life. As human as you or I am. Were. Deceased, with a story about that... [UPDATED as trial progress is reported]

 

https://www.startribune.com/trial-begins-monday-in-fergus-falls-minn-in-case-of-indian-migrant-family-who-froze-to-death-at-border/60118223

 It is Strib's own reporting, local authored content, not a news service carried feed. Besides showing why local media should survive to report stories of local interest, it presents in stark terms of human beings meeting death in trying, a microcosm of a complicated problem, (with a new federal administration proposing a worringly simple massive but questionable solution). 

Again, human beings died, not fundamentally better nor worse than those who happen by chance to have been born in the U.S. of A. No better, nor worse, as humans than I am. A fairly young family with hope, seeking a successful life. 

Looking from the image to be about the same age as JD Vance and spouse with their own two infant children, who also hope and intend to have a joyous and fulfilling life.

Start by noting Microsoft and Google have Indian CEO gentlemen, because they are bright and educated and proven workers, not because of their national origin or ethnicity. Valuable people enter or try to enter the nation, legally or illegally. The CEOs, they are legal entrants.

This dead family - set to cross a border and be met by an American citizen, a man out to make money, apparently with a co-defendant of Indian nationality - possibly a relative of those who died but probably not, with the same common Indian surname, Patel. The codefendant - himself an illegal entrant - is an Indian national claiming he is innocent; while the citizen-defendant claims he was recruited by the Indian, in Florida, and paid by him. The story as published gives detail.

Giving a quote from the start of the item, dated Nov 17, 2024:

Steve Shand worried as he waited for the first group of smuggled Indian migrants to cross the border from Canada into Minnesota one frigid winter night.

“It’s 16 degrees cold as hell,” Shand texted an alleged smuggler from his van in December 2021. “They going to be alive when they get here?”

The migrants arrived safely, and Shand drove them to Chicago without trouble.

But the next month, a family of four migrants — including two children — froze to death on the border after failing to reach

Shand’s van amid a subzero blizzard. Authorities say that Shand and the man he was texting, Harshkumar Patel, frequently spoke of the risk of smuggling Indian nationals through the deep cold of the northern border but persisted anyway. They allegedly coordinated four more illegal border crossings before the deaths on January 19, 2022, led to criminal investigations stretching all the way to India.

In Fergus Falls, Minn., federal prosecutors plan to argue at a trial scheduled Monday that Shand and Patel participated in a “large, systemic human smuggling operation” that brought Indian nationals to Canada on student visas, then smuggled them into the U.S.

The court proceedings are expected to offer a rare inside look into the workings of migrant smuggling on the northern border, where international media coverage of the deaths of Jagdish Patel, 39, his wife, Vaishaliben, 37, their daughter, Vihangi, 11, and son, Dharmik, 3, have failed to slow illegal crossings.

And much more of that "rare look" is in the bulk of the remainder of the story, as linked to below the opening Crabgrass image. 

Fair use demands I let Strib tell its own story. Again, the allegation is that a well funded smuggling conspiracy exists, with this family's deaths in a blizzard being a part of the discovery/unraveling of the conspiracy's existence.

___________UPDATE___________

Strib - 11/20/2024 -

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

A convicted smuggler testified Tuesday that the family called a smuggler in Canada as they struggled to bear the cold weather and were told to come back to be picked up, but no one came.

By Maya Rao

 Quoting a bit, or use the above link for full story:

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.

The last two men were mentioned in opening text above. Continuing -

[...] 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 testified on Tuesday that [...] agents in India charge people $100,000 to be smuggled into the U.S. [...] 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.

That is most of the current news of the smuggling trial, with detail beyond the quote given in the story linked to above. Over 500 people were smuggled into the U.S. by this Indian ring. At $100,000 each, figure out how profitable it was until broken up. And at $100,000 each, on legal student visas to get into Canada, they crossed. 

Elon Musk is alleged to have crossed into the U.S. under questionable circumstances, but he's a billionaire Trump supporter/insider with government contracts to launch secret government satellites, and he did his entry without risk of freezing to death. 

If you think for a second Elon will face any adverse consequences, whatever he did or did not do, you do not understand how justice in the U.S. of A. operates. Elon is a national treasure, his mother is Canadian, and he was legally in Canada; whatever he did to enter our nation. Elon gets a pass, and a DOGE appointment, with DOGE not yet an official government thing. Learn that DOGE does have an X.com account, and learn more detail, here. Learn of three newly announced Trump Cabinet nominees, here. Elon is a U.S. citizen now, at a guess a dual citizen, U.S. and Canada.

All for now. Actually, one further thing. MSN reposted an MSNBC item suggesting Musk has some tie to belief/believers in QAnon, but its inference that way is thin.

Apology for digressing from the Strib report of developments in the smuggling trial going on in Minnesota. A stream of consciousness error.