Port-au-Prince, Haiti - After nearly two months in jail, an American Baptist missionary charged in Haiti with kidnapping 33 children she believed were orphans is maintaining her innocence and says she has faith that she will be released.
"I'm doing OK. My heart aches to be home with my children. I miss them more than I can express," Laura Silsby, 40, told NBC's "Today" show Monday in an interview outside her jail cell in Port-au-Prince. "I am confident that God will overcome all of this and ultimately enable me to be released."
Silsby, a divorced mother of two from Meridian, Idaho, was arrested Jan. 29 along with nine other missionaries from Idaho's Central Valley Baptist Church. The group was detained at the Haitian-Dominican Republic border and accused of attempting to bring 33 children to a Dominican orphanage without proper legal paperwork. Reports soon surfaced that more than 20 of the children had at least one living family member, but Silsby maintains she was led to believe otherwise.
"We were lied to by people who brought children to us and claimed to be either a neighbor or a distant family member. ... They did not honestly tell us who they were," she said in the interview. "It was a matter of wanting to share God's love in me with these children and be able to give them a wonderful place to live."
Eight of Silsby's fellow missionaries were released and returned to the U.S. in February, and a judge released the ninth, Charisa Coulter, last week.
Silsby has called the slow-moving Haitian legal process "confusing" and "challenging" as she awaits Judge Bernard Saint-Vil's decision to release her or order a trial, a decision he said earlier this month he could delayed until early May. In the meantime, the judge added a new charge of "organization of irregular trips" to Silsby's kidnapping charge, a provision from a 1980 law restricting travel out of Haiti that was signed by then-dictator Jean-Claude Duvalier.
In another legal twist, Jorge Puello, an American-born legal adviser who provided his services to Silsby and her fellow missionaries for a fee NBC reports at $30,000, was arrested last week in the Dominican Republic and charged with human trafficking. He's accused of using the Dominican Republic to traffic Haitian children to North America and is wanted in the U.S., Canada, Costa Rica and El Salvador for his alleged link to a human trafficking network, NBC said.
"That is against everything I stand for," Silsby told "Today" of Puello's alleged trafficking. "This man approached my church and my family after we were arrested, offering his help and claiming to be a person of faith. Unfortunately my family members trusted him."
Silsby said she would pray for her release in a case she said began with her good intentions.
"All I know is that I came here with heart and intention to help children," she told "Today." "I deeply love my own children and I deeply love the children of this country."