Trafficking

33 Haitian Children Taken Illegally

Americans accused of illicit adoption scheme.

Ten Americans are in custody in Port-au-Prince after being accused of trying to illegally take children out of Haiti. The suspects—five men and five women—were detained at Haiti’s main border crossing into the Dominican Republic with 33 children aged two months to 12 years and no papers proving the adoptions were legal. Authorities had feared that traffickers would take advantage of the chaos in Haiti following the earthquake that ravaged the country. "We had permission from the Dominican Republic government to bring the children to an orphanage that we have there,” a woman from the group told Reuters from jail. "I was going to come back here to do the paperwork… They accuse us of children trafficking. This is something I would never do. We were not trying to do something wrong."