A U.S. court has charged Simranjit Singh with 4 failed attempt
A man from Ontario is accused of bragging that he moved more than 1,000 people across the Canada-U.S. border. He is now facing a nine-count indictment that says he was the “primary organizer” of a network that moved people across the border using Akwesasne Mohawk territory.
Simranjit “Shally” Singh, from Brampton, Ont., pleaded not guilty to charges of smuggling people on Wednesday in the U.S. Federal Court for the Northern District of New York. On Thursday, he was sent back to the U.S.
According to court records, the indictment is based on evidence gathered through surveillance, Facebook messages, and human sources. This evidence comes from four failed attempts to sneak drugs across the St. Lawrence River between March 2020 and April 2022.
According to court records, Singh acted as a broker and charged between $5,000 and $35,000 per person to smuggle mostly Indian people into the U.S.
He then paid people in the community between $2,000 and $3,000 per person to take them across the river through Akwesasne territory.
Singh’s arrest has nothing to do with the deaths of eight suspected immigrants, four of whom were from India, on the St. Lawrence last week.
But some things are the same.
Singh allegedly did something wrong once. Court records show that a man paid a woman $4,000 to take three Indian nationals across the river to a nearby motel in New York state.
Court records also say that Singh and another smuggling broker used the same Akwesasne boatman at least once. This means that more than one of them was working in the Kanien’kehá:ka (Mohawk) territory, which is on the borders of Ontario, Quebec, and New York. The St. Lawrence River flows through the area, making channels around the islands.
Facing deportatio
Singh is in danger of being deported from Canada. He came to Montreal from India with his then-wife and one child in 2010 and claimed to be a refugee. Then his mother came with his other child and also asked to be a refugee. According to court records, all five were turned down in the end.
The Indian consulate wouldn’t give them travel documents, so the Canadian government couldn’t send them back to India. Singh is now trying to stay in the country with the help of his second wife, who paid for it. When he was caught last summer, that application was still being looked at.
On a Tuesday night in March 2020, a few days before the COVID-19 pandemic shut down the border, Singh is said to have set up a way for three Indian citizens to cross the river illegally.
He used Facebook Messenger to talk to the woman from Akwesasne, who is a single mother, and make plans to pick them up when they reached the shore.
“Ok they cross river,” Singh wrote at 8:51 p.m. on March 17, 2020, according to evidence that U.S. authorities filed in a Canadian court as part of his extradition.
The woman said, “Yes,” and then drove them about 15 km to the Great View Motel in Fort Covington, New York.
The woman, who CBC News isn’t going to name, told the court that she was struggling with addictions at the time to numb the pain of years of sexual abuse as a child and then years of violent domestic abuse as an adult.
According to court records, one of her two children also had a serious illness that kept them in the hospital for a long time.
She took the refugees to Room 103 just before 9 p.m. and sent Singh a text message.
“Dropped,” she wrote.
She then drove to Cornwall, Ontario, on the north side of the St. Lawrence, to get her pay and give Singh some bottles of liquor.
The next morning, U.S. Border Patrol agents were at the hotel waiting and watching. Court records showed that they knew she had brought people there. She also booked their room under her own name. When she was worried, she went back to pick them up, even though Singh told her not to.
After following her, agents pulled them over. The documents say that three men were seen “‘bailing out'” of the car. They were taken into custody and charged with breaking the rules by being an alien. After they said they were guilty, they went through the immigration system.
But it is said that the woman ran away and crashed into four Border Patrol vehicles. She was taken to the hospital just to be safe and then charged. She eventually pleaded guilty to one count of plotting to smuggle aliens and was given credit for the time she had already spent in jail.
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In one of the other cases, a family in India is said to have paid Singh thousands of dollars in late winter 2021 to bring a family member into the U.S. illegally. Singh is said to have driven the person to a motel in Cornwall.
U.S. records say that Singh bragged about smuggling over a thousand people and told the Indian man that he had nothing to worry about.
The Indian man and three other migrants got on a boat on March 4. They landed on a part of Akwesasne in the United States that is run by the St. Regis Mohawk Tribal Council.
But no one was there to take them home. When they found three of them, the tribal police called the U.S. Border Patrol. The fourth was found in a Massena, New York, motel.
Records of their arrest show that one of the migrants said he paid $5,000 and wanted to go live with a relative in San Francisco. Another man told U.S. Border Patrol agents that he paid $15,000 and wanted to work in New York City.
A third said he paid $7,000 US but didn’t know where he was going.
All of them admitted that they had come to the U.S. without permission, were given time served, and were put through the U.S. immigration system.