Ten American Baptists are in jail in Haiti for attempting to smuggle 33 “orphans” out of the country — and many of the children aren’t even orphans at all: Road From Haiti Was Paved With Good Intentions, American Baptists Say.

And one of the pastors involved has denounced “the accusations of Satan.”

Ten American Baptists sit in a Haitian jail on Monday, accused of child trafficking for what they say was a hastily conceived attempt to rescue orphans by quickly removing them from Haiti — before getting official permission or even checking to determine that the children really were orphans. In Haiti and on the Web, the arrests have led to fresh accusations that some religious groups may be guilty of a kind of spiritual trafficking, by mixing the help they offer to victims of last month’s earthquake with proselytizing.

The Baptists were open about the fact that they felt driven by their Christian faith. Speaking to reporters after the group’s arrest, Laura Silsby, who led the Baptist team to Haiti, described the children as “deeply in need most of all of God’s love and his compassion.” In a description of the mission posted online, the group wrote, “God has laid upon our hearts the need to go now.”

Meanwhile in Idaho, where several of the Baptists are from, Rev. Clint Henry, a pastor involved in the effort, denounced what he called “the accusations of Satan,” made against “our team,” The Associated Press reported.

A representative of an Austrian charity that is now looking after the 33 children the Baptist team tried to remove from the country told CNN that an initial investigation showed that at least 10 of them are not orphans.

More details from CBS News:

“In this chaos the government is in right now, we were just trying to do the right thing,” Silsby, told the AP at Haiti’s judicial police headquarters, where she and others were taken after their arrest Friday night trying to cross the border into the Dominican Republic in a bus.

Silsby, 40, admitted she had not obtained the proper Haitian documents for the children, whose names were written on pink tape on their shirts.

The children, ages 2 months to 12 years old, were taken to an orphanage run by Austrian-based SOS Children’s Villages, where spokesman George Willeit said they arrived “very hungry, very thirsty.”

A 2- to 3-month old baby was dehydrated and had to be hospitalized, he said. An orphanage worker held and caressed another, older baby, who was feverish and looked disoriented.

“One (8-year-old) girl was crying, and saying, ‘I am not an orphan. I still have my parents.’ And she thought she was going on a summer camp or a boarding school or something like that,” Willet said. …

In Idaho, the Rev. Clint Henry denied that his Central Valley Baptist Church had anything to do with child trafficking and said he didn’t believe such reports. He urged his tearful congregation to pray to God to “help them as they seek to resist the accusations of Satan and the lies that he would want them to believe and the fears that he would want to plant into their heart.”