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Officials say 13 arrested at dairy were illegal immigrants

The Associated Press - Wednesday, April 11, 2007
TOWNER, N.D.

Immigration officials say 13 employees at a dairy here have been arrested on charges of being in the country illegally.

Those arrested Tuesday included 12 men and one woman, said Tim Counts, a spokesman for federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency. One of the workers is from Guatemala and the rest are from Mexico, he said.

Officers took the group to the Border Patrol station in Bottineau pending a hearing on whether they will be deported.

The men will be held in area county jails awaiting possible bail, Counts said. The woman was released for child care but still must appear at a hearing, he said.

Mike Zimmerman, who operates the Sandhills Dairy, said he believed the workers' paperwork was in order when they were hired.

Zimmerman said immigration agents, accompanied by Highway Patrol and McHenry County Sheriff officers, arrived about 8 a.m. Tuesday to block traffic in and out of the dairy and halt milking operations.

He estimated about 50 officers were on the scene. He said they displayed weapons, kicked down doors and handcuffed his son and employees. Officers also handcuffed a longtime friend of his, held a gun to his head and asked for his birth certificate, he said.

"It's an unbelievable, frustrating and humiliating experience," Zimmerman said. "There's certainly another way to go about getting what they were after than to do something like this."

Counts said the officers were acting on a criminal search warrant based on leads in an ongoing investigation.

"It's important to remember that ICE and its law enforcement partners were executing a federal criminal search warrant issued by a federal magistrate judge," he said. "The actions of our agents, and of every law enforcement officer involved, were appropriate and fully within the law."

Zimmerman said the dairy milks 700 cows three times a day and the raid left him short of workers. He said he may have to start selling off his herd.