A quiet day of baseball practice took a disturbing turn in Manhattan’s Riverside Park on July 3, when Yeoman Wilder, founder of the Harlem Baseball Hitting Academy, says six ICE agents walked onto the field and began questioning his players; middle and high school kids just there to train.
Wilder, who holds a master’s degree in law, initially noticed the officers walking past the basketball courts but didn’t think much of it. “I just thought, eh, they’re ICE officers, because I’d seen them in Washington Heights before,” he recalled.
But what happened next was far from routine. Wilder says the agents approached his players and started asking intrusive questions about their backgrounds. “Where they’re from, who are their parents,” he remembered. “And I just thought, ‘whoa, whoa, this is… this is not good.’”
That’s when Wilder stepped in. Citing their constitutional rights, he instructed the kids to remain silent. “I told my kids to walk to the back of the cages, right here, and I said they’re going to invoke their Fifth Amendment rights, they’re not going to say anything.”
The confrontation escalated when one of the agents reportedly raised his voice and dismissed Wilder’s authority. “That’s when I was called a YouTube lawyer,” he said. “And I said, ‘No, I just know how the Constitution works.’”
Wilder says all of the children on the field are American citizens. “Their parents are from the Dominican Republic, South America, Mexico, Africa—but their kids were born here,” he emphasized. “They have a 14th Amendment entitlement to live here.”
Eyewitness News reached out to Homeland Security for verification, but has yet to receive a response. Wilder maintains that the men were fully uniformed with clearly marked vests and were visibly armed. “They looked like the real thing,” he said. “From what I’ve seen in Washington Heights and what I saw that day.”
In the wake of the incident, Wilder reached out to elected officials, including Assemblymember Linda Rosenthal, who stood by his decision to shield the players. “No one has the right to take you away or to get any of your information,” she said.
Since that encounter, the team’s practice schedule has changed, but the emotional damage lingers. Wilder said only two players have returned to the field. “I’ve never in my life thought this was going to happen on the Upper West Side, in New York City,” he said. “That whole thing—until it happens to you, you’re not aware. And it happened to us.”