Human smuggling conviction upheld in death of Indian family at Manitoba-U.S. border

A U.S. appeals court has upheld the verdict and sentence for one of the men found guilty of human smuggling in a case that led to a family of four from India freezing to death while attempting to cross the Manitoba-U.S. border in 2022.

Earlier this year, Harshkumar Patel asked the court to overturn his conviction and sentence after being found guilty by a Minnesota jury in November 2024.

Patel, an Indian national, was sentenced to just over 10 years in prison after being arrested in Chicago in 2024.

He was found to have co-ordinated the smuggling operation and hired his co-accused, Florida resident Steve Shand, to drive the migrants once they had crossed the border from Manitoba to Minnesota.

In a judgment and opinion posted Monday, the United States Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit upheld the lower court’s sentencing decision, and found there was sufficient evidence to support the jury’s verdict.

A panel of three judges found Patel’s arguments challenging the district court’s guidelines calculations “lack merit,” the documents said. The panel said the district court did not make errors in applying sentencing enhancements for creating a substantial risk of death or for the offence resulting in death.

The court said Patel is not entitled to relief for his arguments that the charges against him were “duplicitious and multiplicitous,” because he “failed to preserve these issues for appeal.”

It also found Patel’s arguments that his convictions on two of the counts were “mutually inconsistent” did not provide a basis for relief.

The frozen bodies of Jagdish Patel, 39, his wife, 37, Vaishali, their daughter, Vihangi,11, and Dharmik, their three-year-old son, were found in a snow-drifted Manitoba field about 12 metres from the U.S. border on Jan. 19, 2022.

A photo posted to Facebook in 2019 shows the Patel family: from left, Jagdish, 39, Dharmik, 3, Vihangi, 11, and Vaishali, 37. They were found frozen to death near the U.S. border in Manitoba on Jan. 19, 2022. (Vaishali Patel/Facebook)

A panel of appeals court judges is scheduled to hear arguments later this month from a lawyer for Shand, who has also asked the appeal court to overturn his conviction and sentence. That court appearance in St. Paul, Minn., is set for Oct. 23.

Court previously heard Harshkumar Patel, who is not related to the Patel family who died, is likely to be deported to India after completing his sentence.