They died 12 meters before reaching the "American Dream"... Bad weather annihilates an entire family
The night Vaishalipin Patal and her husband Jagdish set out with their two children towards the US-Canada border, they donned heavy winter coats and new snow boots.
Where they set off in the Canadian village of Emerson, the temperature was minus 35.
It seems that this young family did not experience exposure to temperatures so low even on the coldest days they lived in India, as the temperature in the family's village in western India does not drop more than 10 degrees below zero.
As they walked, perhaps for a few hours or more, heavy winds carried snow and ice debris across the plains, leaving them completely blind, and Canadian police found the four of them frozen in an open field.
The wife was 37, the husband was 39, their daughter was 11, and their son was three.
They all died just 12 meters from the US border.
The tragic accident, in which a young Indian family made their way from a poor village in Gujarat, India, to the other half of the world shocked Canadians and Indians alike, and revealed the intense pressures that led to the tragedy.
Officials said they believed the family was a victim of human trafficking, and authorities in the United States and Canada are still trying to determine how the Patel family got to Emerson and who led them there where they were found dead.
The village of Dingucha in western India is so far away that it resembles, in terms of distance and feel, the glacier of Manitoba in Canada.
About 12,000 kilometers from Emerson, Dingucha has about 3,500 residents, mostly farmers and middle-class workers in Gujarat.
There, the Battles family lived in a beautiful two-story house with a rooftop porch and a large welcome sign painted above the door.
Their home is comfortably nestled among a row of concrete buildings painted yellow, pink and white.
Some residents appear to have been aware of Patel's travel plans, and told the BBC's Gujarat service that they had gone to Canada on visitor visas.
Relatives were concerned when the family's messages stopped about a week after they left, they said.
On January 11, the family arrived in Toronto, Canada, on a flight before traveling 2,000 kilometers west to Manitoba.
The police did not know how the family got to Emerson;
Did you arrive by land or by air? There are no names of family members in the records of domestic flights.
The journey is long and takes 22 hours on the Trans-Canada Highway.
They were meant to slip across the Canada-US border, past the frozen lakes of southern Ontario, before reaching the sprawling barren fields, where the winds carried snow through the air like smoke.
By January 18, the family had reached Emerson of 700.
The village includes one pharmacy, one grocery store and one school.
The houses are simple one-story dwellings with garages for one car and large yards. The villagers call the village the town of retirees. It is a quiet, pleasant place to live, and there is not much to do in it.
If the Patel family had stayed at an Emerson Inn near the border, they would have seen North Dakota on the right and Minnesota on the left, the Americas.
Here at the southern tip of Manitoba, it can be hard to distinguish between the frigid plains and the snowy skies.
Standing outside in an Emerson winter is unbearable, no matter how many layers of wool and leather you wear.
Cold air enters the lungs and causes heartburn with each breath even when the temperature is 15 degrees higher than the day the Patel family tried to cross the border.
If you walked only five minutes here, said George Andrews, who runs Emerson's only pharmacy, you'll feel as cold as "a dog bites your hand and doesn't let go, and your tears will freeze in your eyes."
In one of the photos of the Patel family, which is now widely circulated, the family looks happy, the four of them smiling as they look into the camera, as if they were photographed for a holiday card.
Darkmick's jacket, the little boy, matches his father's jacket, which was decorated with white flowers on a black ground.
Their 11-year-old daughter, Vihangi, wears the same lipstick as her mother.
Local media said the couple were educated and at one point worked as teachers.
Like many other Gujaratis, the Patel family had a second home in the mostly middle-class city of Kalul.
Villagers reported to the BBC's Gujarati Service that the head of the family, Jagdish, helped his brother in the clothes trade.
Jagdish's parents were often close to the family and also split their time between Kalul and Dingucha.
Despite the semblance of a comfortable life in India, something seems to have forced this family to leave.
Residents of the neighborhood told the BBC that this was a common occurrence in Dingucha.
"Here, every child grows up with the dream of moving to a foreign country," said Dinggucha council member Gram Panchayat.
Many residents of the area spoke of intense and common social pressure to move abroad, and a person's social status is determined by the number of family members living abroad.
Some said that those who remain in the country are seen as unable to raise funds to leave, while others go on.
One person said, “There are cases where young men of marriageable age do not find a suitable girl, because they do not have any relatives in any foreign country.”
Perhaps there was an unrealistic rosy view of life abroad.
Another said: "There are many people who went to the US earlier without proper identification papers, and many of them are in good shape now."
In Winnipeg, Indian-Canadians said they were well aware of the "craze" of moving abroad among middle- and upper-class Indians.
“People imagine that there are trees that pay dollars, I was also imagining that when I came here at the age of 26,” said Mitch Trivedi, a Canadian from Gujarat.
Trivedi, now 59, settled in Canada three decades ago, came there on a marriage visa and became a Canadian citizen in 2000.
In many ways, his life is the life that Indian economic migrants abroad aspire to, he owns a money-making restaurant, has a family and his two daughters have medical degrees.
Although Trivedi received a higher education in India where he completed his engineering studies, the chances of moving to a higher caste are very limited in India.
Trivedi says: "I was born in the lowest ranks of the middle class. If I had stayed there, my class position would not have changed one iota."
According to Trivedi and other Gujaratis, the frantic pursuit of regular immigration has given rise to a clandestine trade centered on “irregular migration,” referring to the irregular border crossings between the United States and Canada.
He and other expats in Winnipeg described clandestine travel networks that plan to move people between the United States and Canada and operate in India, Canada and the United States and facilitate these transits, with relatives and friends of those successfully smuggled becoming witnesses to the success of specific smugglers.
"It's just word of mouth, nothing documented in writing," Trivedi said, adding that he had heard of people who had done so.
Crossing on foot or hiding in car trunks is "nothing new".
These networks can provide safe homes abroad, as regular Indian immigrants provide accommodation or informal employment opportunities for recent arrivals.
A few days after the family's death, Chicago-based doctor Dilip Patel collected donations online to cover the family's funeral costs, and it is not known whether this doctor is a relative of this family or not, nor did he respond to BBC requests to speak .
Police on both sides of the border said Patel's case was likely linked to people smuggling.
The only suspect in this tragedy so far is Steve Shand, 47, a US citizen from Florida, who was arrested last month.
The US Department of Homeland Security said Shand was suspected of playing a role in a "larger human smuggling operation" in connection with the death of the Patel family.
On January 19, the same day the Patel family was found, Chand was arrested in Pembina, North Dakota, less than 8 kilometers from Emerson, driving a 15-passenger minibus with two Indian nationals, with food boxes in his trunk. and waterproof.
Five additional Indian nationals were also found that day, 400 meters south of the Canadian border, heading towards the Shand detention site.
They told the authorities that they walked for more than 11 hours.
Authorities said the Indians had arrived illegally in the United States.
The seven, speaking Gujarati, the native language of the Patel state, were dressed in identical newly purchased winter clothes, similar to that of the Patel family.
One of them was carrying a backpack that did not belong to him, with no baby clothes, diapers and toys.
The group told the authorities that a family of four had left them.
An Indian national who was arrested with Shand told the authorities that he had paid a large sum of money to enter Canadian territory, under a forged student visa.
After crossing the border into the United States on foot, he expected to be driven to his uncle's home in Chicago.
But for the Patel family, key questions remained unanswered: what awaited them across the plains, was it worth the risk, or did they know the risks and still take them?
Among the many painful details of the case that left Canadians confused, the reason for the family's continued journey despite the harsh and dangerous conditions and the bitter cold there.
"Who told them to do this?"
asked Hemant Shah, the Indian expatriate and community leader in Winnipeg.
"Any Gujarati or Canadian would have told them not to go. The temperature was minus 35, and it is impossible for a human being to survive under these conditions," he added.
Perhaps the journey seemed simple to them by gazing across the blurred boundary of snow and uncomplicated in terms of boundaries.
On the night of their crossing, this road was invisible because of the snow, and the sprawling steppe afforded them little vision to show the way.
They didn't even get to the frontier, and they probably didn't even know where they were in their last moments.
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