After the 2010 Haiti earthquake that killed more than 300,000 people, she said many parents were being tricked or coerced into giving their children to orphanages.
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“‘Entrepreneurial’ people have seen that foreigners love giving money to orphanages and because of that, they just set them up and they pay child finders to recruit children,” Mulheir said.

Some of the Americans have said they thought they were helping orphans, but their interpreters said this week that they were present when group members spoke with some of the children's parents.

​Some parents in a village outside Port-au-Prince said they had willingly given their children to the Americans, who promised them a better life. The parents also said they had been told they could see their children whenever they wanted. But the Dominican consul general has said he warned the group's leader, Silsby, about trying to cross the border without proper documents.

There were questions about whether Mr. Puello, the adviser, who said the Central Valley Baptist Church in Idaho had hired him to represent the Americans, was licensed to practice law. Records at the College of Lawyers in the Dominican Republic listed no one with his name.
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Mr. Puello said he had a law license and was part of a 45-member law firm. But his office in Santo Domingo turned out to be a humble place, which could not possibly fit 45 lawyers. Mr. Puello’s brother Alejandro said that the firm had another office in the central business district, but he declined to provide an address.

Suspicions about Silsby’s intent to smuggle or traffic the children to the Dominican Republic further increased, when on March 19, 2010, Silsby’s legal advisor—Jorge Torres-Puello, an American-Dominican living in the Dominican Republic as a fugitive—was arrested and accused of human trafficking.70 U.S. authorities revealed that Torres-Puello was “linked to a net-work that trafficked in Haitian and Central American children and [was]wanted in the United States, El Salvador and Costa Rica.”71 His wife was already imprisoned in El Salvador and “faced charges of presumed sexual exploitation of minors and women.”

Jorge Torres, 34, was already a fugitive when he was indicted in 2003 by a federal grand jury in Burlington, Vt., on charges of conspiring to smuggle aliens from Central America into the United States through Canada in 2002. At the time of his indictment, he was living in Canada under the name "George Simard" after he absconded from federal supervised release following a 1999 bank fraud conviction.
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Starting in 2003, the U.S. government sought Torres' extradition from Canada to face the alien smuggling charges. However, he could not be located.

On February 9th, 2010 Hillary Clinton consulted with Counselor Cheryl Mills and other attorneys in an email discussing the U.S. Government's "options" regarding the arrested Americans. The heavily redacted memo attached to that email does not reveal what these "options" consisted of. However, the State Department's American Citizens Services is only authorized to offer lists of local, English speaking attorneys to Americans arrested or detained abroad. To go beyond that authorization is a severe violation of protocol and is illegal. Additional emails reveal that the State Department was involved with making statements on the Silsby scandal and preparing to assist Silsby's co-conspirators with their return to the United States, although this is consistent with State Department protocol in these situations.