Ten Americans were detained by Haitian police on Saturday as they tried to bus 33 children across the border into the Dominican Republic, allegedly without proper documents. The Baptist church members from Idaho called it a “Haitian Orphan Rescue Mission,” meant to save abandoned children from the chaos following Haiti’s earthquake.

Their plan was to scoop up 100 kids and take them by bus to a rented hotel at a beach resort in the Dominican Republic, where they planned to establish an orphanage.

Whether they realized it or not, these Americans – the first known to be taken into custody since the Jan. 12 earthquake – put themselves in the middle of a firestorm in Haiti, where government leaders have suspended adoptions amid fears that parentless or lost children are more vulnerable than ever to child trafficking.

“In this chaos the government is in right now we were just trying to do the right thing,” the group’s leader, Laura Silsby, told reporters at the judicial police headquarters in the capital, where the Americans were being held pending a Monday hearing before a judge.

Silsby said they only had the best of intentions and paid no money for the children, whom she said they obtained from well-known Haitian pastor named Jean Sanbil of the Sharing Jesus Ministries.

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