Thread: Oregon dairy loses staff in police raid

Oregon dairy loses staff in police raid
By Dairy Herd news source (Thursday, August 23, 2007)

A Benton County, Ore., dairy lost seven of its eleven employees on Tuesday when authorities came to arrest a man suspected of running a cockfighting operation. While there, members of the Corvallis Police Department, the FBI, and Immigration and Customs Enforcement, also took into custody six other dairy employees suspected of being in the country illegally.

All seven remain in the Benton County jail.

According to the Corvallis Gazette-Times, owners of the 1,200-cow Van Beek Dairy cooperated with police on the investigation of suspected cockfighting. However, the dairy was left scrambling, calling on friends, and even Oregon State University students to get the cows milked.

CorvallisGazette-Times

To read the full article, go to: http://www.gazettetimes.com/articles/20 ... 2_raid.txt

http://www.dairyherd.com/directories.as ... ed_id=6798

ELECTRIC MAILKING SYSTEMS DO A GREAT JOB.

The owner must have known this cockfighting was going on.
Now he has to face the consequences.

Lets all go buy some powdered milk.

I agree with Paige. The dairy industry whine a lot. If they need foreign labor - H2A.

I asked my wife to cut down on dairy products. Government suplements. Price protection, foriegn labor legal and illegal. The government needs to clamp down on the dairy industry nationwide.

This raid should have been about illegals from the get go.

Witnesses say they heard cockfights

By Gwyneth Gibby

Gazette-Times reporter

A witness to a cockfighting operation at a dairy south of Corvallis saw as many as 200 roosters bred for fighting, according to court documents released Thursday, as well fake identification documents being bought and sold.

Nicole Courser, 25, was living with her boyfriend, Jose Lopez-Perez, who was an employee living at the Van Beek Dairy near Monroe. Courser told members of the Corvallis Police Department and Benton County Sheriff’s Office combined Street Crimes Unit about illegal cockfights, some being held in a building at the dairy, according to the documents.

Police arrested the dairy’s manager, Martin Ramos-Reyes, on Tuesday and charged him with running a cockfighting organization and possession of methamphetamine. Ramos-Reyes is a Mexican national and is being held in the Benton County jail on $30,000 bail.

Six other dairy workers were taken into custody Tuesday by Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers. They were transported immediately to a federal jail, most likely in Lane County, and will be sent to the ICE center in Tacoma, Wash., according to Benton County Chief Deputy District Attorney Chris Stringer.

Amy Van Beek, whose husband, Martin Van Beek, and brother-in-law, Fred Van Beek, are partners in the dairy, told the Gazette-Times that the owners did not know about a cockfighting operation. Authorities said the Van Beeks cooperated with the investigation.

Courser’s mother, Kathy Kentta, told the Gazette-Times she believed she heard a cockfight going on at the dairy a couple of months ago, in a building about 25 feet from her daughter’s trailer.

“I was over there seeing my daughter,â€