They were not sneaking the children out. They were trying to move them to the Dominican Republic orphanage and they believed their paper work was in order.
Ummm, no, they didn’t believe their paperwork was in order. The group’s spokeswoman freely admitted they hadn’t even attempted to get any permission from the Haitian government. They apparently had permission from the Dominican Republic to bring a group of children IN, but they knew full well they didn’t have permission from Haiti to take any children OUT.
As for where they were planning to take them, frankly it sounds like a classic illegal adoption-for-profit scheme, designed to compete aggressively with other illegal and legal adoption sources. From Fox News: “The Idaho churches had elaborate plans before the earthquake to shelter up to 200 Haitian and Dominican boys and girls in the Magante beach resort, complete with a school and chapel as well as villas and a seaside cafe catering to adoptive U.S. parents.” http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,584423,00.html?test=latestnews
I don’t think there’s a legal adoption source anywhere in the world that can afford to set up anything like a “seaside cafe” as a marketing tool. And why would you plan (before the earthquake) to take children out of their native country to another country, in order to have them adopted by people from yet a third country? I’m afraid I know the answer — it’s easier to obscure the children’s real family situation and real route to the adoption agency when you’ve already got them out of the country where their family resides, and especially when you get them out of the country by sketchy means, such as getting the children from a pastor who vaguely explains that they were left with him “by distant relatives”.
That said, I strongly suspect that *some* of the church members who were in the arrested group honestly didn’t realize that they’d been suckered into helping with an illegal adoption business. The ring-leaders of such businesses know better than to take that many people into their confidence, and churches are a good place to find naive well-meaning people who’ll join in something like this, and provide a lot of free labor, while also helping make it look legitimate.