Since President Trump took office, agents from Immigration and Customs Enforcement have swarmed areas with immigrant populations, questioning people and making arrests. They’ve patrolled near schools and raided a homeless shelter. They arrested a four-year-old, two students of New York City public schools, and an Army veteran who happened to be Latino. Recently, masked and armed ICE agents descended on a baseball field in Riverside Park. They questioned a dozen or so eleven- to fourteen-year-olds who’d just finished batting practice, and left only after a confrontation with their coach, Youman Wilder, whom they threatened with arrest. He said, “I’m willing to die to make sure these kids can get home,” he recounted afterward.
New York baseball people know Wilder. “I hold the city record in batting average to this very day,” he said recently. “My teammate at Thomas Jefferson High ended up playing eighteen years in the major leagues with the Cubs. Shawon Dunston. He was the first over-all pick in the 1982 draft, over Dwight Gooden. The last two games, he got walked, like, six times in a row, and ended up hitting .790. And I went, like, six for six, so I ended up .800.”
Wilder has run a youth baseball program called the Harlem Baseball Hitting Academy for the past twenty-one years. There are about twenty-five kids, no tryouts (“We don’t take the best players. We take the guys that got cut”), and no minimum fee. “I’ll tell our kids, ‘Can your mom make us some rice and beans this week?’ ” Wilder said. He has produced four hundred college-scholarship baseball players, who have gone to Stanford, Princeton, and Columbia, and are now doctors and cops, or work on Wall Street. Four have made the major leagues.
After high school, Wilder played in a barnstorming league in Mexico. “It was sponsored by drug dealers. One game, we were losing 6–1, and the guy we were playing for said, ‘You guys have to leave, unless we win.’ We saw the guns, and we were, like, Oh, we actually have to win. My friends and I decided that maybe we won’t do this anymore.” He returned to New York, where he worked as a jazz and R. & B. singer, and hung around the baseball scene. “I actually helped Manny Ramirez with some of his hitting,” he said. In 2003, he began holding informal sessions in a park for some local kids. They were asked to play in front of dozens of pro scouts who’d come to see a future Yankees pitcher named Dellin Betances. “The first inning we hit for the cycle,” Wilder said. “The second inning we had eight straight singles up the middle. And then I heard a scout say, ‘Who the fuck are these kids?’ ” After that, he turned his park sessions into a formal academy.
Wilder views baseball as a tool to teach important lessons. He also just loves it. “Baseball is life,” he said. “You start at home, and we’re going to send you out. And it’s going to be hard for you out there. But you could make it easier for yourself swinging at strikes to get to first base. And how can we get you to second and third? You can do things quicker, sharper, crisper. All those things get you around. Same thing in life. We deal with a lot of gangs. Our kids could get stopped and beaten up. I tell the kids, you have to use your baseball. How do you get from first base to third base without getting thrown out?”
The program sometimes practices at a field in Riverside Park, off West Seventy-second Street. The sand is lumpy. A foul pop-up off the third-base line lands in the Hudson River. You can bounce a longish home run off the elegant, arched steel superstructure of the Joe DiMaggio Highway, which is painted the color of the Statue of Liberty. Last month, Wilder had just concluded a session in the batting cages with a group of new kids. He saw six ICE agents approach. “I thought they were speaking about baseball,” he said. “And then I heard, ‘Where are you from? Where are your parents from?’ ” Four had face masks. All had guns and tasers.
Why were they questioned? “Our kids are from Washington Heights and Dyckman and the South Bronx and parts of Queens,” Wilder said. “They are Black and Latino. They come from the projects. Kids who love baseball who can’t afford baseball.” He went on, “We also have Milo. Milo is a white kid who actually is from Harlem and is proud of it, too.” All were American citizens. (A spokesperson said that ICE had not conducted any recent “enforcement activity” in the vicinity of the park.)
Wilder told his kids to get behind him. He told the ICE officers they were invoking their Fourth and Fifth Amendment rights. “My words were, ‘You don’t have more rights than they do,’ ” he said.
One officer said, “Oh, another YouTube lawyer.” They threatened to arrest Wilder for obstruction. But, after a few minutes, they left. The kids hurried home. The next practice, only one showed up.
In the days afterward, Wilder met with his congressman, Adriano Espaillat. An immigration attorney volunteered to sit and watch practice. “We are not victims,” Wilder said. “Our kids will do well in life.” Wilder had to leave town a few days later. He was driving four players on college tours in a rented minivan. But he received word that, last Wednesday, when his colleague Pedro came to pitch batting practice, seven players were there to take swings. ♦
