Attorney for one man charged in migrant family’s death on Canada-Minnesota border says he was duped

FERGUS FALLS, Minn. – Steve Shand was just a cab driver who was tricked into picking up migrants without knowing they were part of a smuggling operation, his defense attorney said on the first day of his trial in federal court Monday.

“Mr. Shand did not agree to participate in any crime,” assistant federal defender Lisa Lopez said in her opening arguments.

She said that co-defendant Harshkumar Patel recruited Shand many times as a driver for groups of people in Florida, where they lived and met, before asking him to start transporting passengers in the Midwest. The first such trip in December 2021 – which prosecutors say was the start of a conspiracy to illegally bring a series of Indian nationals over the northern border – took place after Patel directed Shand to pick up some people at Love’s Travel Stop in Drayton, N.D. and bring them to Chicago, according to Lopez.

The town wasn’t on the Canadian border; in fact, Lopez noted, it was 30 miles away. She said Shand found nothing particularly suspicious about the job, “and that’s how Mr. Patel sort of eased Mr. Shand into these out-of-state trips. That’s how he had him become an unknowing participant in his scheme because that first trip raised no red flags for Mr. Shand.”

But prosecutors said the two men on trial were so driven to make money off desperate migrants over the course of four subsequent trips that they continued with plans to have a group of 11 people illegally cross the Canadian border into Minnesota during a subzero blizzard on the night of January 19, 2022, leading to a family of four freezing to death.

“This case is about these two men putting profits over people’s lives,” said federal prosecutor Ryan Lipes, turning and pointing at the defendants.

The deaths of Jagdish Patel, 39; his wife Vaishaliben, 37; their daughter Vihangi, 11; and son Dharmik, 3, drew international attention and spawned investigations in the U.S., Canada and the family’s native Indian state of Gujarat. (The victims are not related to Harshkumar Patel, who is also from Gujarat.)

Shand and Patel were indicted in Minnesota for conspiracy to transport and bring unauthorized immigrants to the U.S., causing serious bodily injury and placing lives in jeopardy and attempted transportation and aiding and abetting transportation of aliens for commercial advantage and private financial gain.