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Stephanie Square, the woman from Akwesasne arrested in August on an extradition request from the U.S. alleging she is responsible for the deaths of four of the nine people who drowned in an attempt to smuggle them across the Canada/U.S. border last year, says she is willing to wear a GPS-locating bracelet in order to be released while her case at the Montreal courthouse is pending.
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Square, 51, also told Quebec Superior Court Justice Daniel Royer on Wednesday that she would also agree to live with her mother in Akwasasne and follow a curfew in order to be released. She said she is willing to check in once a day with the Awkwesasne Mokawk police, “a short walk” from her mother’s house.
Her mother, Catherine Square, 85, testified in support of the release.
“She has to follow the rules or else I call the (Akwesasne Mohawk police). They’re always just around the corner,” Catherine Square said while answering questions from defence lawyer Joēl Girard.
Stephanie Square said she will not possess a cellphone if released on bail, but she conceded when asked by prosecutor Anne-Renée Touchette that her mother and a cousin living at the same address own cellphones.
While answering questions from Girard, Stephanie Square said she was born and raised in Akwesasne, has a traditional Mohawk name and only lived outside the Mohawk reserve for a few years in Cornwall to help a friend raise her child. She said she and her family celebrate Mohawk traditions and that she was sexually abused at a Catholic school when she was a child.
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She told the judge she was the youngest of seven siblings, but three have died in accidents.
Girard cautioned his client a few times to avoid talking about the evidence gathered in the case she is facing at a courthouse in New York.
Square has been in detention since her arrest Aug. 22. She told the judge she is in poor health, which makes being detained, after the U.S. government requested her extradition, difficult.
She is named in a warrant in a U.S. District Court charging her with conspiracy to commit alien smuggling, four counts of alien smuggling for profit and four counts of alien smuggling causing death. “Alien” is the term often used in the United States for illegal immigrants. She is alleged to have tried to smuggle four members of a Romanian family: Florin Iordache, his wife, Cristina (Monalisa) Zenaida Iordache, their two-year-old daughter, Evelin, and one-year-old son, Elyen, into the U.S.
They were among the nine people who drowned on March 29, 2023. The other five people who drowned in the botched smuggling operation were Akwesasne resident Casey Oakes and a family from the western Indian state of Gujarat. They included the father, Praveenbhai Chaudhari, 50; mother, Dakshaben, 45; son, Meet, 20; and daughter, Vidhi, 23. Square is not alleged to have tried to smuggle them.
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