'I was very scared,' migrant who survived crossing border in blizzard says at human smuggling trial

A 23-year-old Indian national now working as a cashier at a doughnut shop in Chicago as he awaits the conclusion of his immigration case told a human smuggling trial Wednesday he still remembers the harrowing journey he made across the Manitoba-U.S. border during a blinding snowstorm almost three years ago — and the family who never made it to the other side.

Yash Patel told a Minnesota jury one of his grandfather's friends arranged for him to make the trip from his home state of Gujarat to Toronto on a Canadian student visa in December 2021. He said he was then transported to Vancouver and back to Toronto before being brought to a house in the Winnipeg area with a group of other migrants the following month.

When a van arrived at the house to pick them up for the trip to the border, Patel said the family of four — including two kids — was already sitting inside the vehicle. Soon, they were all dropped off in the middle of a blizzard and told to walk straight until they saw another vehicle that would be waiting to pick them up.

Patel said it didn't take long for the group to become separated.

"I was very scared. I wanted to have help from somebody, but there was no one who could come and help me," Patel testified through a Gujarati interpreter. "It was so cold and I was alone. That was the reason I just kept on walking."

Patel said he walked for hours in the dark before finally finding the van on the other side of the border and getting inside, where one of the other migrants and the man driving were waiting. The rest of the group from the house in Winnipeg eventually made it over as well and were all taken into custody by Border Patrol agents.

But he said he never saw the family again.

The frozen bodies of Jagdish Patel, 39, his wife, Vaishali, 37, their 11-year-old daughter, Vihangi, and their three-year-old son, Dharmik — who are not related to Yash Patel — were found in a snow-drifted field just 12 metres from the U.S. border later on the morning of Jan. 19, 2022. 

The temperature that day was –23 C, but the wind chill made it feel like the –35 to –38 range.

The testimony came on the third day of the trial of two men who are alleged to have each played a role in the smuggling scheme that led to the family's deaths. Steve Shand and Harshkumar Patel, who is not related to the family or the witness, have pleaded not guilty.

Harshkumar Patel was arrested in Chicago in February 2024. Shand was arrested by U.S. border patrol agents on a highway in Minnesota, just south of the Canadian border near Emerson, Man., with other Indian migrants in the van he was driving around the same time the Patel family's bodies were discovered.

Their trial started Monday and is scheduled to take approximately five days in Fergus Falls, Minn., about 80 kilometres southeast of Fargo, N.D. — the closest federal courthouse to where the incident happened.

Under cross-examination, Yash Patel said he was given few details about why he was being moved around once he got to Canada, and said he didn't know who paid for his trip — which Shand's lawyer Lisa Lopez noted court heard can run about $100,000.

He testified he also didn't know he was being sent to enter the U.S. illegally, but said when he arrived there he decided to stay.