ICE Is So Out of Control, They Tried to Raid a Kids’ Baseball Practice

All the kids, according to Wilder, were born in the U.S. and are U.S. citizens, born to parents from Africa, South America, and Mexico.

“It’s all about civics. If you don’t know your rights, they will trample on them,” Wilder told the Rag. The coach also expressed his shock and dismay at the amount of people who watched the interaction but failed to intervene.

“There were people watching and the agents were telling them to move back, that they would be arrested for interfering, and not to take pictures,” Wilder told the Rag. “The worst thing is that the six or seven people who were watching, followed their orders!”

“I never in my life thought this was going to happen in the Upper West Side in New York City,” Wilder told Eyewitness News. “That whole thing, until it happens to you, you’re not aware? It happened to us.”

Wilder has since changed the location and practice times for his team, but some kids and their parents have been so rattled by the event that they haven’t returned to practice.

“I knew that they could arrest me, but I knew that they couldn’t keep me,” he said. “My whole thing is that I’m African American, and most of my kids are Latino and Black, so it was all about how do I get these kids home. I never raised my voice. I just talked about the law. And I was just focused on how can I get these kids to where they need to go, when they are in my care.”

Wilder was “the only thing that stood between those kids in Riverside Park and a Florida detention center buried deep in the Everglades,” Upper West Side Assemblymember Linda Rosenthal wrote in a newsletter earlier this month. Rosenthal told Eyewitness News that Wilder was right to intervene and had the legal authority to do so.