The Child Catchers: Rescue, Trafficking, and the New Gospel of Adoption (5 page)

Susie Krabacher is the director of Mercy and Sharing, a long-running Christian orphanage in Haiti that doesn’t conduct adoptions. According to Krabacher, after the earthquake unethical adoption and child sponsorship programs became “the biggest money-making operation in Haiti,” with real and fake orphanages “popping up everywhere.” In the case of fake orphanages, savvy Haitians tried to capitalize on Westerners’ interest by rounding up neighborhood kids to play the part of orphans when tourists came by in order to solicit donations. In the real orphanages staff made blunt suggestions that parents struggling to feed their children should give one up. Krabacher estimated that among Mercy and Sharing’s own 181 employees, “We’ve got 90 percent who would have to look at the option of giving up a child if they didn’t have a job.”

Sometimes the death of a family member precipitates such relinquishments, as families spend their last $75 on a coffin to bury the dead—a nonnegotiable rite in Haitian culture. Sometimes it’s the drain of sending one child to school at the expense of feeding the others so that the one child might eventually bring the family out of poverty. There’s a word-of-mouth component as well, as people in positions to counsel parents, such as church pastors, have been known to call orphanages and tell them when a young woman is pregnant as well as to help convince the expectant mother to relinquish her child in exchange for a cut of the adoption fee. It’s not uncommon, Krabacher said, for women working in orphanages to place their own children for adoption, meaning that some nannies are actually tending their own children until the day they are adopted away. “The people almost never really want to give up the child,”
Krabacher told me. “When they do it, it’s because they think they’re going to save the other three at home.”

IN PICTURES TAKEN
after her arrest, Laura Silsby appeared as a resolute woman with a youthful, freckled face and shoulder-length brown hair, wearing sleeveless blouses and denim shorts in the Caribbean sun. Picturing her in the calling she had imagined for herself was easy—a vision of an orphanage director making a fresh start in a simple life, moving between the developing world of orphanage children and the first world of adoptive parents she would cater to as they brunched by the beach at Silsby’s seaside villas. It likely didn’t hurt that this life would track with the increasingly visible representation in Christian movies and media of white evangelicals saving black children, from
The Blind Side
’s sassy Memphis adoptive mom to
Machine Gun Preacher
’s gun-toting savior of Ugandan child soldiers, both careening into danger to save children in need.

Throughout their imprisonment the American missionaries claimed they had acted in good faith, believing they had government permission to transport the children. In reality at least Silsby had received repeated warnings that her plan was unethical and illegal. Prior to taking the children Silsby had contacted Dixie Bickel, director of the God’s Littlest Angels orphanage, who claimed she told Silsby that “UNICEF and [Haitian Social Services] are waiting to crucify somebody like you, taking children out of Haiti.”

Before carrying out her plans, Silsby had also spoken to a US journalist, Anne-Christine d’Adesky of
Haiti Vox Bulletin,
explaining that they had a letter from a Dominican government minister authorizing their transport of one hundred children and “connections” that would help her cross the border. Although d’Adesky had warned Silsby that such a letter was inadequate authorization, Silsby was unfazed. “Throughout our conversation,” d’Adesky later wrote, “she repeatedly referred to God having called her to rescue the Haitian children. God had spoken to her. If God wanted them to succeed, they would.”

When Silsby had spoken to a Port-au-Prince school official about her plan, the official had told her that it was “unconscionable.” Another orphanage director, Hal Nungester from H.I.S. Home for Children, told
CBS News
that Silsby had approached their orphanage, seeking one hundred orphans to take to the Dominican Republic. “They had no paperwork. They had no authorization from the U.S. government, from the Haitian government, or from anyone involved. They were just taking
kids. That fits right in with what I would classify as child trafficking,” Nungester said.

A Dominican official, Carlos Castillo of the DR’s consulate in Port-au-Prince, had met with Silsby soon after she and her group arrived in Haiti. Castillo had warned her that she didn’t have sufficient documentation to transport children from Haiti to the DR. “She told me she would try to reach the border in order to cross,” Castillo told the
Wall Street Journal.
“I told her not to do that without the necessary documents because she could be accused of trafficking children.” Regardless, Silsby offered Castillo’s business card when she reached the Dominican border, claiming he had authorized her passage.

A police officer later alleged that he had stopped Silsby’s bus of children several days before their arrest and had told them that their plan was illegal. Despite these many warnings as well as the fact that Silsby had shown a savvy understanding of the residency requirements for adoptive parents coming to the Dominican Republic, she would go on to claim ignorance of Haiti’s adoption laws.

Silsby had also contacted a Kentucky couple, Richard and Malinda Pickett, who were in the midst of adopting three children from a Port-au-Prince orphanage, and offered to pick the children up for them. The Picketts, fearful she would jeopardize the proper legal proceedings of their adoptions, told Silsby to leave the children where they were. However, Silsby went to their orphanage anyway, claiming to be Malinda’s friend. When she learned that the children were no longer in residence, she asked the staff if there were any others she could take instead.

Silsby made the same inquiry at other orphanages, which, to her distress, refused to give her any of their wards. Richard Pickett later told a Kentucky television station that he thought Silsby had intended to use a “mild form of extortion” on him and his wife in the case that she had succeeded in picking up their children. “She asked for kids at each of the orphanages, and at the end of the day when no one would give her any, she cried,” he told the Associated Press. “Why would you cry after you see these kids are being taken care of?”

RUSSELL MOORE,
dean of the school of theology at the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Kentucky, and author of a book promoting adoption among Christians, worried that the Silsby scandal would “give a black eye to the orphan-care movement.” Moore, a rising young star in the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) who frequently
guest hosts theologian Albert Mohler’s radio show, dedicated his program on February 1, 2010 to the controversy. “I thought, ‘Oh no, this is going to cause all kinds of derision to the orphan-care movement and to what the Holy Spirit is doing in churches all across America and all over the world in having a heart for orphans,’” Moore said.

Moore’s guest, fellow adoption activist Jedd Medefind, president of the Christian Alliance for Orphans, described the incident as an embarrassment to the cause. At the time the Christian Alliance was promoting its annual conference as a way that “ordinary people can make a
lasting
difference for orphans—in Haiti or otherwise.” Medefind had responded to the Silsby story with a
Christianity Today
op-ed entitled “Strong on Zeal, Thin in Knowledge,” describing Silsby’s actions as an aberration. “I think some folks who really oppose our approach to caring for children will kind of point to this very mistakenly as Exhibit A of reasons why a focus on adoption is not healthy and why you should leave caring for orphans just to governments and not allow ordinary people in the church to be involved,” he told Moore.

Adoption professionals, like Tom DiFilipo of the adoption lobby group the Joint Council on International Children’s Services, refused to acknowledge the connection at all, arguing that because the group was acting outside adoption law, they couldn’t be planning adoptions. “What they were going to do with those kids I don’t know,” he told me, “but it sure as hell wasn’t adoption. Their actions were wrong, clearly, and abhorrent in the way they went about this. It was equally abhorrent the way it was portrayed in the press that this was an adoption-related incident.”

But in fact Silsby’s failed mission looked less like the exception than the rule of the “orphan airlifts” taking place after the earthquake. When For His Glory Adoption Outreach attempted to evacuate 100 infants and young children out of Haiti just after the earthquake, ferrying them to the US embassy uninvited in the hopes that arriving with a busload of carsick children and CNN reporters would force the embassy’s hand, a staffer justified it by saying, “The children do not want to go back to the orphanage. They want to go to America.” They eventually ended up flying 110 orphans out of the country, including one for adoption by the agency’s president, Kim Harmon. H.I.S. Home for Children, another evangelical organization, flew 67 to Miami and 50 to Orlando on military cargo planes.

Senator Amy Klobuchar, a Democrat from Minnesota who has made common cause with conservatives like Senator James Inhofe (R-OK) and former Senator Sam Brownback (R-KS) on adoption legislation, spoke at
Medefind’s Christian Alliance for Orphans Summit later in 2010, boasting that her office had helped bring thirty-nine Haitian orphans to Minnesota despite the complications thrown in the works from “the Idaho people.” Klobuchar later told me how, as part of the first senatorial group on the ground in Haiti, she had urged Haitian President René Préval to request that Minnesota’s humanitarian parole cases be expedited and to revise the country’s adoption and parental rights policies as part of reconstruction so as to clear the obstacles that were impeding more adoptions.

People began to speak in counterfactual terms of “repatriating” Haitian children to the United States or “reunifying” them with adoptive parents, despite the reality that none of the children were being returned to their home countries or families in any way except in the minds of prospective adoptive parents, who had already come to think of the children as their own. Others used the emotional language of a hostage situation. A Salt Lake City TV station reported that Stephen Studdert, a former Mormon mission president and Republican adviser to Presidents George H. W. Bush, Ronald Reagan, and Gerald Ford, had used his connections in Washington and “negotiated the release” of at least sixty-six orphans bound for Salt Lake City.

Although Haiti had taken the advice of UNICEF and Save the Children to close its doors to new adoptions temporarily, allowing only humanitarian parole cases to proceed, demand remained strong. When a rumor started in Indiana that three hundred Haitian child refugees would be brought to the state, Safe Families for Children, a Christian foster care alternative organization, aided by a local six thousand–member megachurch, recruited hundreds of volunteers to adopt them, even though no Haitian children were actually coming. Some adoption agencies continued to sign up applicants for Haitian adoptions or put people on “waiting lists.” Others used the outpouring of interest to divert prospective adopters to other countries where they worked.

The US humanitarian parole program in Haiti allowed expedited adoptions for only two categories of children: those whose adoptions were all but completed before the earthquake and those who had recently been matched with prospective adoptive parents but who needed to be evacuated for their safety. But in practice, in the latter category the standard of proof was so low—such as children who had had any level of contact with a family in the United States—that other children ended up being transported under official US jurisdiction as well, including children from orphanages that were largely unaffected by the earthquake or those who had not been cleared for adoption at all. Two siblings whose adoption had
previously been denied after their father objected—he had initially thought adoption was a chance for the children to go to school—were rushed out of Haiti on humanitarian parole after the earthquake, and their adoption was approved in a US court that didn’t hear the Haitian family’s arguments. “God got done in 10 days something human beings couldn’t do in years,” the adoptive father told the
New York Times.

But perhaps the most famous case was that of twelve children sent to Pittsburgh on a military cargo plane commissioned by former Pennsylvania Governor Edward Rendell. On January 19, just one day after the US humanitarian parole program was announced, Rendell and Pennsylvania Representative Jason Altmire muscled through the evacuation of fifty-four children housed at a Christian orphanage, BRESMA, run by two young, photogenic Pittsburgh sisters, Jamie and Ali McMutrie. Rendell’s position allowed him to land his plane at the chaotic Port-au-Prince airport in the same time period when a Doctors Without Borders flight was diverted three times to the Dominican Republic.

When Haitian officials only approved twenty-eight of the fifty-four BRESMA children to leave, the McMutrie sisters refused to budge. They insisted on taking all fifty-four. Governor Rendell and his wife, a circuit court judge, appealed to US diplomats in Haiti and contacts at the White House. Eventually they were allowed to take all of the children, including twelve whose families hadn’t authorized their adoption. These twelve “orphans” would remain in legal limbo in a Pittsburgh Catholic institute for nearly a year while the International Red Cross found and contacted their families in Haiti. The mother of one of the children later told the
New York Times
that she hadn’t known she wouldn’t see her child again until she visited the orphanage several days after the evacuation to discover they were all gone. Even adoption advocates recognized that the mission had been poorly executed. “The exception made for these children was based on the political connections of Governor Rendell and the emotional response of the McMutrie sisters, when it should have been based on a plan that ensured permanent care for the children,” argued a brief on postearthquake adoptions issued by the National Council for Adoption (NCFA), one of the two largest US adoption lobbying groups. (The NCFA had discouraged immediate adoption of new “orphans” after the earthquake in favor of children already in institutions and worried that vigilante rescue efforts would antagonize foreign governments into shutting down adoption permanently.)