Port-au-Prince, Haiti - The U.S. pastor of five of the 10 Americans who are scheduled to appear in a Haitian court today to face child trafficking charges said the missionaries were there to help children, not kidnap them.
"I can assure you that the intent of our group going down there had absolutely nothing to do with kidnapping and everything to do with helping a desperate situation in Haiti," the Rev. Clint Henry, from the Central Valley Baptist Church in Meridian, Idaho, said on "Good Morning America" today.
The 10 Baptist missionaries said they were attempting to bring 33 Haitian children to an orphanage across the border in the Dominican Republic when they were arrested Friday night at a border crossing.
"They were arrested on the border with children that were not theirs, and that they had no papers for," Haitian Prime Minister Jean-Max Bellerive told ABC News. "For me, it's not Americans that were arrested, it was kidnappers that were arrested."
Henry said he spoke to the missionaries Friday night before they tried to cross the border and they told him there was some confusion over what paperwork they needed to bring the children into the Dominican Republic.