By Jennifer StaggSALT LAKE CITY -- A group of volunteers from the Utah Hospital Task Force boarded a charter plane Thursday in Salt Lake and headed for Haiti. They planned to pick up 150 orphans and bring them to their adoptive parents in Utah.

If all had gone according to plan, the volunteers and children would have arrived Friday night to excited and anxious parents, but the group encountered some roadblocks.

New video coming out of Haiti Friday showed the nearly 850 doctors, nurses and humanitarian volunteers from the task force and The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints at the airport in Haiti, getting ready to board a plane headed for Utah.

"We made a commitment to the parents in Utah that we weren't leaving this country without their children," said volunteer Jason Glen Taylor.

Finding the children was the easy part, getting them out of the country proved to be much more difficult.

"My view is that they should suspend a lot of these administrative rules in such a human crisis," said Stephen Studdert, who chartered the airplane for the Utah Hospital Task Force.

The Haitian government has locked down adoptions, and cutting through the red tape for these kids took the work of four U.S. Senators -- including Utah's Orrin Hatch and Bob Bennett -- a U.S. ambassador and two former White House officials. Every child released needs the Haitian Prime Minister's approval.

"These are all pre-earthquake adoptions. As you well know, the problem started well before the earthquake, so these babies have been on a waiting list," Taylor said. "Some of these parents have been waiting two years for these children."

Related:

Haitians tire of waiting, start own rebuilding

Defying pleas to wait for Haiti's reconstruction, families lugged heavy bundles of wood and tin up steep hillsides Friday to do the unthinkable: build new homes on top of old ones devastated in the earthquake.

But not every parent waiting in the states got good news; only 141 of the 150 orphans made it on the plane. The remaining nine were held back because officials said they needed updated fingerprints.

The news was disheartening for volunteers, who had hoped to fly back to Utah with a plane full of children.

"These babies will not survive here. There's babies dying in the streets. Let us take these babies home," Taylor said.

For the orphans who made it on board, the chartered plane flew them to Miami, where they will remain in Red Cross and Immigration and Customs Enforcement custody until their adoptive parents come to pick them up.

Some of the volunteers plan to stay in Miami and Haiti to work on getting the remaining children who were left behind; others will be headed back to Utah as soon as they can catch a flight.

In a statement Sen. Orrin Hatch, who worked with the group to get the children cleared to leave, said, "Today's airlift is a momentous first step in getting these Haitian orphans out of harm's way and into the homes and loving embrace of the families who have adopted them." [CLICK HERE to read the complete statement]

It's been an emotional roller coaster for the adoptive parents. KSL News has learned one of the Utah agencies expecting orphans had to tell parents none of the children they had been working with made it on the flight. They are all still in Haiti.

E-mail: jstagg@ksl.com

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