Haiti: Christian Americans Detained

[OfficerFriendly]

The group of five men and five women, at least some of the group are members of the Central Valley Baptist Church in Idaho, were arrested for trying to move the 33 children to the Dominican Republic after the 7.0-magnitude earthquake January 12 that devastated parts of Haiti.

The group said it planned to start an orphanage in the Dominican Republic. Some of the children were found to have consenting parents.

The very least that can be said of this group is that they were criminally uninformed and unprofessional in their approach to "helping". They had no idea that it might not be legal to just take children out the country without any paperwork and without being sure that the children were orphans? The arrogance is astounding. They believed that they knew what was best for these families. Handing out the pictures of the swimming pool to parents who couldn't feed their kids a week after an earthquake was very tempting but perhaps it would have been more helpful if they had brought a bus load of food to the families instead of taking their kids