The immigration crisis the United States is facing isn’t just on the southern border. While people illegally entering through the southern border encounter risks including heat, dehydration, and drug cartels, there are people also attempting to come in across the northern border. These people also face hazards, not least of which is sub-zero temperatures.
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Jagdish Patel and his wife Vaishaliben, along with their two children, learned this the hard – and permanent – way when they froze to death in the depths of the northern winter, while trying to meet their ride into the United States:
On the last night of their lives, Jagdish Patel, his wife and their two young children tried to slip into the U.S. across a near-empty stretch of the Canadian border.
Wind chills reached minus 36 Fahrenheit (minus 38 Celsius) that night in January 2022 as the family from India set out on foot to meet a waiting van. They walked amid vast farm fields and bulky snowdrifts, navigating in the black of an almost-moonless night.
The driver, waiting in northern Minnesota, messaged his boss: “Make sure everyone is dressed for the blizzard conditions, please.”
Coordinating things in Canada, federal prosecutors say, was Harshkumar Patel, an experienced smuggler nicknamed “Dirty Harry.” On the U.S. side was Steve Shand, the driver recently recruited by Patel at a casino near their Florida homes, prosecutors say.
It is belaboring the obvious to note that a family from Dingucha, India, lacks experience with the kinds of winter that the people of Canada and the northern tier of U.S. states take for granted. But the Patels were taken in by a sophisticated system of human smuggling, which advertises in small towns in India and elsewhere:
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The narrow streets of Dingucha, a quiet village in the western Indian state of Gujarat, are spattered with ads to move overseas.
“Make your dream of going abroad come true,” one poster says, listing three tantalizing destinations: “Canada. Australia. USA.”
This is where the family’s deadly journey began.
This isn’t a new problem, although it tends to be overshadowed by the catastrophe on our southern border. In October, RedState’s own Rusty Weiss described some more fair-weather crossings in the north:
See Related: ‘An Everyday Thing’: Eerie Trail Cam Footage Catches Illegals Invading Family Farm on Northern Border
Weiss wrote:
Images emerging from trail cams placed on a family farm in a small Vermont town are a stark reminder that border security in the North is also a disaster under the Biden-Harris administration.
The images come from Newport Center, a town with a population of about 1,500. The cameras are situated roughly 2.5 miles south of the U.S.-Canadian border.
The Newport Dispatch reports that multiple cameras on the LeBlanc family farm caught multiple groups of men traversing the property, including one image capturing “what appeared to be several men led by a guide wearing a turban.”
The property owner notes that the man in the turban, eyes glowing in the images, was spotted making separate runs “back and forth” to guide different groups.
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But there is some cause for hope: The borders, north and south, are about to come under new management.
See Related: President-Elect Trump Names Tom Homan ‘Border Czar’
Immigration was a significant issue in the election just past. The issue has a lot of aspects: Jobs, the drain the influx puts on big cities and small towns alike, the crime issue, and the pressure on our welfare systems. But we shouldn’t forget the human cost, and that cost can be exemplified by the plight of the Patels: Four people smuggled to North America, and left to their own devices to walk across the American northern border, on a night when temperatures reached depths at which even Alaskans stay indoors and huddle up around the wood stoves.
The border crisis is replete with examples like this: Poor people, filled with promises, cruelly exploited by traffickers who all too often abandon them to the elements. Fortunately, starting in January, all this will start to change.
