Houston:
A Florida man has pleaded not guilty to human trafficking in a case linked to last year’s discovery of a family of four migrants from India found frozen to death a stone’s throw from the Canada-US border, according to media reports .
Steve Shand, 48, refrained from reading the indictment before entering the plea via video conference as part of a short but highly anticipated indictment in Duluth, Minnesota.
Shand is accused of illegally bringing migrants from India to the US on a freezing night in January 2022, the Grand Forks Herald newspaper reported.
“Not guilty,” Shand said when Minnesota magistrate Judge Leo Brisbois asked him how he pleaded with the charges — one count each of illegally bringing people into the U.S. and transporting them within the country.
He was arrested in January 2022 in a remote area of northern Minnesota where US border agents met him with two Indian nationals in a rented passenger van.
Just across the border in Manitoba, about 40 feet from the Canada-US border, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) discovered the bodies of four people who authorities believe froze to death while trying to slip into the US undetected , news agency Canadian Press reported. Relatives have identified the victims as Jagdish Patel, 39, his wife Vaishaliben, 37, and their two children: daughter Vihangi, 11, and three-year-old son Dharmik.
Three people in India are charged in the death of the Patel family.
The family of four died from exposure.
Authorities also found five other Indians walking in dangerous conditions along the same road where Shand was arrested.
One of them was carrying a backpack containing children’s clothes, toys and a diaper that he said belonged to a family of four who were separated from the larger group during their 12-hour nighttime odyssey.
Shands faces up to 20 years in prison if found guilty.
A jury trial was set for July 17 in Fergus Falls, but Brisbois — who has yet to rule on a number of discovery and production requests — said the final date will depend on the trial judge.
Authorities in the US suspect the case is related to a larger people-smuggling operation — a problem that has long been linked to activities along the southern border with Mexico, but which some lawmakers on Capitol Hill say is growing in scope in the north.
The U.S. Customs and Border Protection Service reported 11,583 “encounters” with non-Canadian citizens at or near the northern border last month, up from 5,317 in April 2022.
For fiscal 2023, there are already 76,471 similar encounters, more than the 68,935 recorded during all 12 months of fiscal 2022.
In April this year, 8 people – believed to be two families of Indian and Romanian descent – drowned while illegally attempting to cross the St. Lawrence River into the United States from Canada.
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by DailyExpertNews staff and is being published from a syndicated feed.)