MINNEAPOLIS _ The body of a woman from Ghana was found just south of the Canadian border in far northwestern Minnesota, and authorities suspect she died from exposure while trying to reunite with her daughter.
Mavis Otuteye, 57, was found dead a half-mile from the border by local and U.S. Border Patrol investigators in a watery drainage ditch near Noyes late in the afternoon on Friday, according to the Kittson County Sheriff's Office.
A day earlier, someone called the Sheriff's Office and reported that Otuteye had been missing since May 22, authorities added.
Chief Deputy Sheriff Matt Vig said he believes Otuteye, who had been living in Delaware, was trying to walk across the border and meet up with her daughter in Canada.
"I think temperatures were in the 40s that night," Vig said in a television interview with WDAZ in Grand Forks. "Just tough weather for her to make that journey."
Vig also suspects that her body ending up in the ditch "played a role (in her death). It's hard to say exactly what happened. We'll find out more in the final autopsy report."
He did not disclose the daughter's precise location in Canada. The town right across the border, Emerson, has roughly 650 inhabitants. Fewer than 50 call Noyes home.
Regina Otuteye, who lives in North Carolina, said Wednesday that she last spoke with her sister-in-law in March, and she "never talked to me about anything" concerning any intention to travel from Delaware to Canada to see her only child. Regina Otuteye said her brother and Mavis have been separated for many years, and he lives in Ghana.
While it's not yet clear whether Otuteye's effort to enter Canada included seeking asylum there, Minnesota has become a key stop for a soaring number of migrants from Somalia and other African countries who sneak in with that intent.
From April 2016 though January, more than 430 arrived in the Manitoban capital of Winnipeg _ significantly higher than normal. Most come by way of Minneapolis, sometimes after grueling treks across Latin America and stints in U.S. immigration detention.
The exodus is coinciding with new steps by the Trump administration to tighten immigrant and refugee entry.
Frank Indome, an executive with a support group for Ghanaians living in Manitoba, said he had not known about Mavis Otuteye during the time she was reported missing. Indome said his Ghanaian Union of Manitoba is "still trying to find" people in the province who have an association with Otuteye, but "there doesn't seem to be anyone who knows her or is acquainted with her."
Indome cautioned against assuming that Otuteye was an asylum-seeker, pointing out that "hers is not the normal profile of people we have crossing. They are usually men in their 20s. She really doesn't really fit the profile of those leaving the U.S. for more kind (immigrant) policies."
In the past four months, nearly 600 people have crossed from the United States into Manitoba in pursuit of asylum, according to Welcome Place, a Winnipeg-based organization that helps with the settlement of refugees.
Indome predicted that "with the good weather that we are having, more people will be thinking of doing this."
