Woman Pleads Guilty in Northern Border Smuggling Case That Killed Family of Four, Including Two Toddlers

A woman living on the Akwesasne Mohawk Indian Territory, which straddles the U.S.-Canada border, pleaded guilty Thursday to orchestrating a smuggling operation that killed a family of four, including two children under age three, according to the Justice Department and reporting by The Daily Wire.

Stephanie Square, 53, a dual Canadian-American citizen, admitted to conspiracy to commit alien smuggling, four counts of alien smuggling for financial gain, and four counts of alien smuggling resulting in death. She faces a minimum of five years in prison and a maximum of life, according to the DOJ.

Prosecutors say the scheme began in March 2023, when a Canadian smuggler contacted Square and asked her to move a Romanian family of four across the St. Lawrence River into New York. Square recruited several accomplices to carry out the crossing.

At least one recruit refused to participate, citing dangerous wind conditions on the river that night. Square kept looking for someone willing to do the job anyway, according to the DOJ, and allegedly insisted on getting paid regardless of the risk.

One of Square's regular drivers, Dakota Montour, brought the family to the home of Timothy Oakes on Cornwall Island, a known staging point for smuggling operations along that stretch of the border, prosecutors say. The family arrived around 3:35 a.m. on March 29, 2023, and left that evening. Witnesses reported seeing Oakes' car hauling a light blue boat toward a public launch.

The Akwesasne Mohawk Police Service searched for the family after they went missing and recovered all four bodies between March 30 and March 31, 2023, along with the boat itself. The boat's captain, Casey Oakes, was not found until months later, according to the DOJ.

"Aliens attempting to enter the United States illegally across the U.S.-Canada border are exposed to a range of dangers at the hands of human smugglers trying to capitalize on the misfortunes and misplaced hopes of others," said Assistant Attorney General A. Tysen Duva of the Justice Department's Criminal Division. "Here, in the face of known dangers, the defendant directed her co-conspirators to smuggle a family with young children across the St. Lawrence River on a cold, windy night with limited visibility. The dangers materialized into a preventable and tragic loss of life."

The case underscores a corridor of the border that gets far less attention than the U.S.-Mexico line but carries its own lethal risk profile. The St. Lawrence River crossing near Akwesasne has been used by smugglers for years, in part because the reservation's jurisdictional overlap between the U.S. and Canada complicates law enforcement response.

A Broader Numbers Fight Over Deportations

Separately, the Trump administration has crossed a milestone of more than one million total removals of illegal immigrants since President Trump returned to office, according to data obtained by The Daily Wire from the Department of Homeland Security. But the figure blends different categories of enforcement that not everyone agrees should be counted the same way.

Of the one million, ICE has carried out roughly 706,000 removals from the interior of the country. Customs and Border Protection accounts for about 323,000 more, mostly recent border-crossers turned back at the line. The Coast Guard removed another roughly 900 people.

Todd Bensman, who recently left his post as senior adviser to the ICE Office of the Director and now works at the Heritage Foundation, said the administration inherited a badly degraded enforcement system. "I don't think anyone in the administration is thrilled with these numbers over 18 months given that 200,000-plus a month were pouring over the border for four years straight," Bensman told The Daily Wire, adding that detention space had to be rebuilt and 10,000 agents hired before Congress passed funding legislation.

But other former immigration officials, including some who support Trump's broader agenda, argue the million-person figure overstates what most people mean by "mass deportation." Scott Mechkowski, former ICE New York field office deputy director, told The Daily Wire the total conflates three distinct operations. "ICE works the interior, CBP works the border, and the Coast Guard works on the water," he said.

Mark Morgan, former acting CBP commissioner, was blunter: "Mass deportations are not happening." Morgan argues the number that matters is removals of people already living in the United States, not border turnbacks, which he says shouldn't count toward the same total.

Mechkowski and Morgan are affiliated with the Oversight Project, a conservative nonprofit that is suing the Trump administration over unanswered Freedom of Information Act requests for detailed deportation data. The group contends the administration may be presenting the numbers in a way that makes enforcement look more aggressive than it is.

The disagreement here isn't between critics and supporters of stricter immigration enforcement. Bensman, Mechkowski, and Morgan all broadly favor tougher enforcement. Their dispute is over accounting: whether combining CBP border turnbacks with ICE interior arrests into one headline number gives an accurate picture of how many people who were already living in the U.S. have actually been removed.

The Oversight Project's FOIA lawsuit remains pending, and DHS has not released a public breakdown that separates interior arrests from recidivist border crossings in the way Morgan and Mechkowski are requesting. Until that data is produced, the exact size of the "mass deportation" effort, as opposed to routine border processing, remains a genuinely open question even among enforcement hawks.