NYC Baseball Coach Says ICE Questioned Kids At Practice

A New York City youth baseball coach said he intervened to inform armed Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers of his players’ constitutional rights after the officers approached kids during a practice at a local park last month.

Youman Wilder, a founder of Harlem Baseball Hitting Academy, told MSNBC’s Nicolle Wallace that practice was wrapping up at Riverside Park in New York’s Upper West Side when he saw several officers — armed with guns and Tasers — walking up to players, asking them where they and their parents were from.

“I just stepped in and said, ‘This is very inappropriate to ask these kids anything,’” explained Wilder, noting that he advised the agents that the players would implement their Fifth Amendment rights.

Wilder, who claimed that one agent referred to him as “another YouTube lawyer,” said the agents then “kept changing the goalposts.”

In a separate interview with New York-based news site West Side Rag, Wilder said the officers began talk of “obstruction of justice” on his part, entertained the idea of cuffing him and claimed that if the kids — 11 U.S. citizens in middle and high school with African, South American and Mexican families — “were here legally [then] what do they have to lose by answering” questions.

“It’s all about civics. If you don’t know your rights, they will trample on them,” explained Wilder, adding that there was “no moment of hesitation” when it came to pushing back at the officers.

Agents eventually left following Wilder’s intervention, the coach said.

Wilder, who holds a master’s degree in law, told Wallace that it shouldn’t take someone with his educational background to know people’s rights and stressed that such an encounter could “happen to anybody.”

Wilder — a coach of over 20 years in the Upper West Side who has worked with dozens of draft picks and a number of players in Major League Baseball — said there’s now just one kid showing up to practice, which is at a new location and time since the encounter.

He choked up as he expressed his disappointment with the “cowards” who were nearby and didn’t intervene, noting that he fears predominantly-Latino schools in the area will be agents’ next target.

He added that people have to continue “speaking up” and that he was disappointed more bystanders didn’t confront the agents in the park that day.

“The only way you can protect people is understanding that the Constitution has a role. And we have to rely on that. And we can’t cherry-pick it,” Wilder said.

ICE is set to receive billions of dollars in additional funding since President Donald Trump signed his “big, beautiful bill” into law earlier this month. Already, immigration arrests in the New York City area have reportedly “rapidly accelerated” in recent weeks as the president looks to deliver on his mass deportation agenda.

ICE has turned its attention to immigrants with no criminal history since May, according to The City in an analysis of federal records provided by the Deportation Data Project.

HuffPost has reached out to ICE, which was not immediately available for comment.