Youman Wilder, who founded a nonprofit baseball academy in New York to help Black and Latino youth, and who said he intervened last summer when Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents began questioning his players after a practice, died on July 20 at his home in the Harlem neighborhood of Manhattan. He was 63.
The cause was a heart attack, his brother, Derrick Wilder, said.
Youman Wilder drew national headlines for his account of an incident in early July 2025, when ICE was drawing intense scrutiny for its actions as part of the Trump administration’s aggressive crackdown on illegal immigrants.
Mr. Wilder had organized a hitting practice on July 3 for roughly a dozen middle school, junior high and high school players in the batting cages in Riverside Park near 72nd Street on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. After practice ended, he told multiple news outlets, six federal agents, armed and identified by their gear as “ICE” and “Police,” approached the players and began asking questions, including “Where are you from?” and “Where are your parents from?”
Six months earlier, Mr. Wilder had received a master’s degree in criminal justice from Grand Canyon University in Phoenix. He thought the questioning by the agents was inappropriate, he told reporters, adding that all the players were born in the United States, a number to immigrant parents from the Dominican Republic, Central and South America, Mexico and Africa.
He said he gathered the players at the back of a batting cage and stood at the entrance, telling the agents that the players would invoke their Fifth Amendment right to not speak. The agents called him a “YouTube lawyer,” he said, and threatened to handcuff him, but he told them that the young players did not have “any fewer constitutional rights than you.” The agents, he said, walked away.
No video of the episode appears to have surfaced.
Mr. Wilder told Scripps News that he did not believe the agents were there to detain the players, but to “make a statement: ‘We’re here.’” If such an incident could happen in a liberal bastion like the Upper West Side, he told The West Side Spirit, “it could happen to anyone.”
A spokesman for ICE told news organizations at the time that Mr. Wilder’s accusations were “false,” and that the agency had not conducted “any recent enforcement activity” in the vicinity of Riverside Park.
Assemblywoman Linda Rosenthal, who represents the Upper West Side, said in an interview with The New York Times after Mr. Wilder’s death that some residents of Lincoln Towers, near Riverside Park, as well as a group of alarmed children’s nannies, had reported seeing what appeared to be ICE agents in the area around early July 2025.
Ms. Rosenthal, who spoke with Mr. Wilder about a week after the episode, recalled that he was “righteously enraged” and that she believed his account.
“He didn’t seem to be afraid of ICE and was totally intent on protecting the kids,” she added.
Representative Adriano Espaillat, Democrat of New York and chairman of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus, said in an interview that he also believed Mr. Wilder’s account.
Mr. Espaillat described Mr. Wilder as “somewhat of a father figure” to the players. “The fact that he stood up was impressive,” Mr. Espaillat said, adding that the incident had a “chilling effect” on youth sports leagues in the area, with some players from immigrant families reluctant to participate.
Youman (pronounced YO-man) Wilder was born in Brooklyn on June 17, 1963, the second of four sons of Austin Wilder, a preacher and building superintendent, and Anna (McPherson) Wilder, a gospel singer. They divorced when Youman was young.
At Thomas Jefferson High School in the East New York neighborhood of Brooklyn in the early 1980s, he was a baseball teammate of Shawon Dunston, a shortstop who in 1982 was the first overall pick in the major-league draft by the Chicago Cubs.
In 2025, Mr. Wilder told The New Yorker that he had hit a remarkable .800 in his senior season in high school, besting Mr. Dunston’s documented batting average of .790. Whether that was true or merely bluster between friends and one-time teammates, in 2018 Mr. Dunston told The Athletic of Mr. Wilder, “That little dude could hit!”
And, following his mother, he could sing, too: gospel, jazz and R&B. On Facebook, he posted a performance he gave at the Apollo Theater in Harlem, and he toured North America and Europe. Reviews of his concerts on a BBC jazz blog in 2006 and 2007 noted that he performed benefits for pediatric AIDS research and for the victims of the conflict in the Darfur region of Sudan.
In a 2016 interview on the Jazz Music Review blog, he spoke about enduring physical and mental abuse from his stepfather when he was a child; about a stroke that affected his vocal cords in 2011; and about the breadth of his musical curiosity.
“I can sing a Black torch song, a movie soundtrack for an animation, and turn around and do straight Rodgers and Hammerstein with a 90-piece orchestra,” he said.
Baseball became a salve for his troubled childhood and likely influenced his desire to become a coach, said Derrick Wilder, who is his brother’s only immediate survivor.
“He didn’t want children to struggle and go through what he went through,” Derrick Wilder said, adding about the ICE incident: “He wasn’t going to let that happen to those children. That’s why he spoke up.”
Mr. Wilder’s playing career after high school included time in Mexico, on a barnstorming tour and in a league, he told reporters. He received a bachelor’s degree in criminal justice from New England College in 2023.
In 2004, he founded the nonprofit Harlem Baseball Hitting Academy with the goal of helping players of color get college scholarships and prepare for professional careers in and out of baseball.
On the academy’s website, nearly 100 alumni are profiled. One of them, Angel Peguero, said in an interview that Mr. Wilder “changed my life” when he helped him get a baseball scholarship to the New Mexico Military Institute in 2012. Mr. Peguero was later hired to coach in the minor league systems of the Philadelphia Phillies and the Texas Rangers.
He said that Mr. Wilder did not charge money for the academy, which was funded with donations, and kept in touch with his former players, even attending Mr. Peguero’s wedding in 2022.
“If he didn’t do anything, that would have been more of a surprise,” Mr. Peguero said of Mr. Wilder’s response to the ICE agents. “If Youman was in our lives, he would find a way to protect us any way possible.”
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