Indian couple and their two children freeze to death as they try to reach the US

New York, 14 Mar A family from India — father, mother and two children aged eleven and three — froze to death as they tried to reach the United States from Canada, where a smuggler abandoned them to their fate along with another group of Indian immigrants, only with the instruction to “keep walking south”. Jagdish Patel, 39, and his wife Vaishali, 37, who left teacher jobs behind in the Indian state of Gujarat until they were unemployed by covid-19, died along with their son Dharmik and daughter Vihangi, just 13 meters from the US border, after a heavy snow blizzard that prevented them from seeing split up of the rest of the group they were traveling with, as reported today by the New York Times newspaper. The Patels, who were looking for a better life as had happened with others who emigrated before Gujarat, would be expected on the U.S. side of the border by another smuggler, who would take them to their final destination in Chicago, where they had families, as promised. “The family probably got disoriented, lost, and maybe stopped and didn't know what else to do,” Dan Riddle, chief meteorologist at the National Weather Service in Grand Forks, North Dakota, told the newspaper Dan Riddle, which adjoins Canada. This place has become an attractive place for immigrants who want to reach the US after authorities tightened surveillance on the country's southern border with Mexico. On the route from Canada there are no National Guard troops, nor the scorching desert heat, nor the imposing border wall. But the inhospitable northern plains along the North Dakota-Minnesota border can be especially dangerous in the winter, when blizzards sometimes reduce visibility to zero, the Times notes. According to Riddle, getting lost, instead of continuing south to the United States, the family headed east, thus moving away from the meeting point. The couple and their children were located after several immigrants with whom they were traveling were found by Border Patrol agents in North Dakota to whom they reported on a family of four who had separated from the group, starting an intense search that included drones, an airplane, ATVs and agents on both sides of the border. The rescued immigrants had been walking through a desolate area for 11 hours with knee-deep snow. The Patel arrived in Canada on January 12 and six days later were among the group of 11 Indians who were left in the town of Emerson with instructions to walk south until they saw the lights of a natural gas plant across the border, the only landmark for several miles, the New York Times also notes. There, near the Red River, a van would be waiting for them, adds the newspaper. On January 18, they all left at dusk for the United States. Previously there was a blizzard warning that would limit the visibility of the National Weather Service, so the recommendation was to travel only if it was an emergency. Soon after, the wind threw snow everywhere and the Patel separated from the group. Even if they wanted to go back, they couldn't see where they were headed, according to Riddle. The intense search of several hours led them to find frozen in the snow the contorted corpses of the Patels' and their three-year-old son and several meters away the girl, curled up like a ball, also points out the Times. The bodies were veiled at a funeral home in Winnipeg, capital of Manitoba province, Canada. CHIEF rh/fixed