The Child Catchers: Rescue, Trafficking, and the New Gospel of Adoption (6 page)

An unnamed State Department official told the
New York Times
that “This wasn’t supposed to happen this way,” but the popularity of Rendell’s
rash mission outweighed such tepid bureaucratic rebukes. In the wake of Rendell’s rescue operation Kathleen Strottman, executive director of the NGO the Congressional Coalition on Adoption, said that adoptive parents lobbied many government officials from other states, arguing, “Governor Rendell flew down there, why can’t you?”

The rule bending wasn’t limited to overzealous individuals, however. At the 2010 Adoption Policy Conference in New York Whitney Reitz, the USCIS staffer credited with crafting the “humanitarian parole” program, was reported by
Huffington Post
as saying, “The idea was to help the kids. And if we overlooked Hague”—the international adoption convention—“I don’t think I’m going to apologize.”

Reitz’s colleague, USCIS spokesperson Chris Rhatigan, said the quote was taken from an off-the-record session meant to be attended only by adoptive parents. Otherwise Rhatigan defends the actions of USCIS staff as exemplary under the circumstances of a full-scale emergency, when US personnel were working under duress and long hours to get children out of the country: holding conference calls with adoption service providers, answering endless questions from panicked prospective adoptive parents, and even fielding adoptive parents’ midnight calls as they passed through immigration in Miami with their new children. In their field office in Haiti, immigration officer Pius Bannis, who would be named the 2010 federal employee of the year for his work during the crisis, worked twenty-hour days for two weeks as he helped document hundreds of Haitian children for adoption, some of whom stayed at the embassy in a makeshift day care. “Very extraordinary measures were taken to save the lives of over 1,100 children,” Rhatigan said. “In light of the emergency situation, I think they did everything they possibly could have.”

In the end some 2,100 children were adopted out of Haiti after the earthquake, including more than 1,150 children to the United States and about 900 more to Europe and Canada. It’s not a huge number, but it was double the country’s normal standard and a sizable percentage of international adoptions to the United States in 2010. About 350 of the children sent to the United States represented adoption cases that were nearly final, whereas the remainder—the vast majority of the humanitarian parole cases—were in the second, more ambiguous category. “This acute augmentation in figures shows that inter-country adoptions were disturbingly ‘over’ prioritized during the emergency,” a report from International Social Services concluded. The report also found that the expedited procedures “resulted in what one can only describe as chaos for all parties involved,” with no Haitian oversight body, no investigation of
children’s surviving family, and with Haitian government officials who were as disconnected from adoption policy as the minister of agriculture being called upon to approve children’s adoption paperwork.

After the Haiti earthquake, several congressional bills were proposed, and Christian bloggers lobbied hard for them. There was the HOPE Act—an acronym for Haitian Orphan Placement Effort—that was sponsored by Republican Representative Peter Hoekstra of Michigan. This bill sought to expand humanitarian parole adoptions to children who hadn’t been in the process of being adopted. And there was the Help HAITI Act, introduced by Republican Representative Jeff Fortenberry of Nebraska, an antiabortion stalwart whose bill aimed to “help Haiti” by expediting permanent resident status and, thus, eventually citizenship for Haitian adoptees rushed into the country under humanitarian parole. Controversy almost struck down the bill in late November 2010, when an unnamed Democratic aide told
Congressional Quarterly
that Democrats were considering tying the bill to President Obama’s DREAM Act, which would have created a path to legal residency for undocumented children whose parents had brought them into the country. Conservatives reacted with outrage, with
Rightwing News
sputtering, “Think of it . . . if Republicans vote against the DREAM Act . . . they would also be voting AGAINST the orphans.” Once again the lines between which sorts of poor people from developing countries deserved Americans’ help were clearly drawn.

“This [bill] is about Haitian orphans and their adoptive American families,” said Fortenberry, seemingly unaware of how that definition conflicted with the bill title’s larger promise to “Help Haiti.” “To leverage that bill for a highly controversial immigration measure was just wrong.” The bill passed, without any association with the DREAM Act, on December 1. Fortenberry called it a “Christmas present” for adoptive families.

GOVERNMENT OFFICIALS
often bend to pressure from constituents when it comes to adoption, seizing the opportunity for an easy PR boost and not recognizing the rationale behind adoption restrictions. As Karen Moline, a board member of Parents for Ethical Adoption Reform (PEAR), an adoptive parents’ advocacy group, said, “Congress’s slant is that international adoption is good, let’s get those kids out. They don’t understand the business aspect of it, just the humanitarian side.”

But at least for a short time the Silsby affair changed the script for how adoption ethics are discussed, bringing a critique of Western imperialism—
a topic usually reserved for academia—into the public sphere. For Moline, “Laura Silsby did a good thing. She put a face to the worst part of what international adoption can be, which is entitlement” to poorer countries’ children.

Karen Dubinsky said that the long-standing debate over international adoption is often interpreted in binary terms, seen as either solely rescue or solely kidnapping. The Silsby affair brought these discussions into sharp relief. “Usually things are more subtle than that, but this was one of those moments where the battle lines became incredibly stark,” said Dubinksy. “What they tried to do has been done a million times in human history, especially after disaster. . . . It’s become seamless: disaster happens, and we in the West show up with bottled water, and we’ll take your children.”

It had happened five years earlier, in Indonesia’s Banda Aceh province after the 2004 tsunami, when the Virginia-based missionary group WorldHelp announced its intention to adopt 300 Muslim tsunami orphans into a US Christian orphanage so the group could “plant Christian principles as early as possible.” And it had happened again in 2007, when a French charity, Zoe’s Ark, was accused of kidnapping 103 children from Chad, children they claimed were Sudanese war orphans when in fact many were local Chadian kids with families. (Group members were initially sentenced to eight years’ hard labor but were later pardoned by Chadian President Idriss Déby. They faced trial in France in December 2012.)

However, by 2010 the disconnected missions of various Christian ministries had become a cause, and in Haiti the seams of the typically seamless narrative—disaster abroad followed by American adoptions—were unusually visible. With Haiti’s government in a state of sudden and obvious devastation and its sovereignty disputed on all sides, the fate of the country’s children became a line in the sand. “Silsby had the misfortune to arrive on the scene at this particular moment,” Dubinsky said.

Silsby seemed to recognize this too, appearing indignant in her defense that she was being punished for something so many had done before. In an affidavit she would later file when her ex-husband sued for full custody of their children, Silsby downplayed the scandal, explaining, “We learned ours was only one of many groups bringing children out of Haiti without documentation or incident.”

In their public statements, though, Silsby and the missionaries maintained that they had been called by God. Silsby’s former live-in nanny, twenty-four-year-old Charisa Coulter, whom Silsby had made codirector of New Life Children’s Refuge, echoed this: “We are 10 Christians who
obeyed God’s calling,” she said. “We went to help the nation of Haiti and their children and for reasons unknown to us, it did not go the way we planned.”

In the first days after the arrests the missionaries added a mystique of martyrdom when they said simply, “Philippians 1” when television reporters asked them about the allegations against them, a reference to the Apostle Paul’s letter from prison and an implication that they had been jailed for their beliefs. They sang hymns as they were driven back to jail after being formally charged. And when a
Time
magazine journalist visited them in jail in mid-February, the missionaries told the reporter, “The Philistines won, the Philistines won.”

The Central Valley and Eastside Baptist Churches in Idaho posted announcements that the team had been “falsely arrested” over a “misunderstanding,” and some Christian groups decried the arrest as persecution for their faith. (Pastor Paul Thompson of Eastside Baptist, one of the jailed missionaries, would later let loose with a series of accusations that UNICEF had orchestrated the arrests as part of a campaign of spiritual warfare, claims that UNICEF tersely denied in full.)

But most Christian groups kept their distance, and some even rebuked the church culture that inspired Silsby. Fritz Gutwein, a US Baptist minister and adoptive parent with a background in Haiti, wrote a polemical essay for the
Associated Baptist Press
arguing that the prosecution of Silsby’s team was good for the US evangelical church, which he saw as embracing a heretical and reckless attitude about adoption. If the missionaries were duped at all, Gutwein wrote, “They were duped by the peculiar strain of American evangelicalism that seems to think the United States is God’s chosen country and that seeks conversions by any and all means, including adoption. . . . This has been taken to the extreme by theologians and pastors who encourage infertile couples to have the family of their dreams and expand the Kingdom
at the same time
by adopting a child from another culture and heritage and replacing that heritage and faith with their own.” The Silsby saga turned even seedier when Jorge Puello, a US-born man living in the Dominican Republic who volunteered to represent Silsby’s group, posing as an attorney and using an alias, turned out to be wanted for questioning concerning human trafficking and child prostitution in both the United States and El Salvador. (In 2011 Puello—charged under the name Jorge Torres—was sentenced to three years in US federal prison after pleading guilty to separate, earlier charges of alien smuggling.)

The mood in Haiti shifted more decisively against the missionaries. When a Minnesota adoptive mother came to the country to pick up her
new adoptive son and five other children who had lived at the Children of the Promise orphanage—an undamaged orphanage ninety miles outside the capital that nonetheless evacuated children under humanitarian parole—a group of men surrounded her at the airport, demanding to see her paperwork. “They started screaming at us that they are Haitian children,” a volunteer with the group told CNN, “and who do we think we are taking their kids from their country, and these missionaries can’t be stealing kids.” Central Valley Baptist Church posted an acknowledgement on their website that Silsby’s group had made mistakes and asked the Haitian prime minister to forgive them. Charisa Coulter was released from jail in March, and Silsby, who was eventually convicted of the separate, lesser charge of arranging illegal travel, was released for time served in May.

Prime Minister Bellerive spoke to the circus aspect of the Silsby trial and how it had subsumed a majority of public attention around the larger crisis. “I believe it’s a distraction for the Haitian people,” he said, “because they are talking more now about 10 people than they are about one million people suffering in the streets.” A Haitian man living on the grounds of the courthouse where Silsby was tried agreed, telling
ABC News
that “These people are American. The whole world just wants to know what will happen to the Americans.”

EVEN AFTER
the very public Silsby affair, the lessons that Christian adoption advocates might have been expected to learn didn’t seem to take. Whereas Silsby became a villain or at least an embarrassment in the eyes of most observers—an opportunist who used the earthquake to reinvent herself, trampling on another country’s laws and families in a quest to appear heroic—things aren’t always as clear-cut. Silsby wasn’t the renegade bad apple that adoption advocates sought to portray her as but rather the person who took prevailing practices to their logical end: the sense, as one critic put it, that “I’m on a mission. I have every right to be on this mission. The rules are stupid because I know better.” Other orphan-rescue missions happening almost simultaneous to the scandal displayed a similar disregard for the law, but it was a disregard that could be harder to recognize coming from a more likable advocate—one like Tom Benz.

In February 2010, just weeks after Silsby’s arrest, Benz, a kindly fifty-seven-year-old evangelical pastor, announced a new plan on the website of his ministry, Bridges of Faith. In coming weeks, he wrote, they would “airlift 50 to 150 orphans” to the ministry’s 140-acre prayer and retreat
center, BridgeStone, a sprawling campus of cabins and recreational amenities set among the cotton fields and Confederate graveyards between Montgomery and Birmingham. It would be the ministry’s pilot program, Haiti OrphansNoMore, hosting Haitian children for three months in Alabama to help them learn English, “immerse them in the gospel,” and “incubate adoptions” with the scores of local families Benz had signed up in the days after the earthquake. He appealed to donors to sponsor children at $200 each, the cost of processing their passports, which Benz, an excitable man easily stirred to poetry, called their “passport to the future.” “Think of how many orphans will find forever homes!!” he wrote. “Will you help a child receive their passport to the U.S. and to a new life in Christ?” According to Benz’s plan, after a ninety-day residency in Alabama, children picked for adoption would return to Haiti temporarily to live at a new transition home he would establish and then prepare to move to America.