The Enforcement Directorate (ED) has filed a first information report (FIR) in the illegal immigration racket allegedly masterminded by a purported agent, Bobby Patel alias Bharat. Bobby is already in jail following his arrest by the Gujarat Police.
Bobby is suspected to have conducted hawala transactions worth over Rs 1,000 crore. The police sources said that he has been involved in human smuggling for almost a decade and he may have sent more than 200 people from Gujarat illegally to the US via Canada with the help of his aide Charanjit Singh, who holds a US passport.
One such family of four, from Dingucha village, was found frozen to death on the Canada-US border. Sources said that Bobby’s involvement in criminal activities extend beyond human trafficking. He is also an accused in the fake passport scam and the IELTS paper scam. Police sources said that Bobby himself has procured around 28 passports.
‘TAPPING ON US CRAZE’
Police sources said that agents like Bobby Patel flourish due to massive craze among a section of Gujaratis, especially those in the rural and semi-urban areas, to migrate to the US through any means. One such case that opened the proverbial can of worms was of Dingucha resident Jagdish Patel, who along with his wife and two kids was found frozen to death near the Canadian border while being smuggled into the US.
Last year, in the aftermath of Jagdish Patel and his three family members’ deaths, Vibes of India spent two days in Dingucha to understand the residents’ inherent desire to take life-threatening risks for the big American dream.
Read about it here: Dingucha Where Death Is More Lucrative Than Life
The village consists of Thakors and Patels who are majorly into farming and factory labour. To fetch better employment opportunities, most families here have at least one member working in the US or Canada. “If a child is born in Dingucha, one thing is written in his fate – he will go to America. If a man neither goes to the US nor has any relatives there, then there is a faint chance that he will even get a bride,” a local had told VOI about the unwritten norms of Dingucha.
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