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.