As 14-year-old Lucas Sheehy arrived early to school, another student stopped him.
“Did you hear what happened to coach?” Lucas recalled his teammate asking him.
To the young baseball players at D.C.’s Alice Deal Middle School, Amaury Monsalve is known as “Coach A,” a fixture of the local community who families say has brought championships, life lessons and joy across the teams he has led throughout Northwest Washington.
Monsalve just saw the team through a winning season. The students now don’t know when, or if, he will return.
Monsalve was detained by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement on Oct. 19 after an immigration judge ordered him deported, the agency said in a statement. Monsalve, originally from Venezuela, had been a lawful permanent resident for two decades, but the agency moved last year to revoke his status, alleging that he lied on immigration paperwork to illegally obtain a green card. He remains in ICE custody in Louisiana, according to agency records.
Monsalve’s wife, Aniushka Monsalve, said that the lawyer who prepared his green card documents decades ago did not disclose he had a son with her. Monsalve, who spoke limited English at the time, signed without realizing the error, she said.
Monsalve’s detention comes as the Trump administration has swept thousands of people into immigration custody, including people who have long lived in the United States and those with no record of violent crime.
Eight of Monsalve’s current and former players, who have spent recent days brainstorming on how to help him, spoke, with permission from their parents, with The Washington Post. They described his detention as unfair and undeserved and spoke of their worries about entering a season without him.
“I was totally in disbelief, like, how? Because he does so much,” said Lucas, noting that despite being one of the youngest players, he’s “known Coach A longer than anybody else on this team.” “I don’t understand why our society is removing these people or taking these people when we should be thankful for them. I’ve known immigrants all throughout my life, and all I can say is they’ve had positive impacts towards my life.”
More than a dozen families have written letters to support Monsalve’s case ahead of his bond hearing Nov. 3. Students have also shared a fundraiser on social media, which had amassed about $80,000 as of Tuesday night, to ease his family’s financial burden. The students said they are also considering posting signs or holding a rally to raise awareness.
Word of the efforts has reached Monsalve in Louisiana, who said Tuesday in a voice memo provided by his family to The Post that he was “very shocked, because I’ve always been in the community to give. Never was in the community to get something, but this reaction in this difficult time gives me the strength.”
Monsalve said that since he has been detained it has been a “really difficult time for me … and I feel very overwhelmed.”
Monsalve came to the U.S. in 2003 and became a permanent resident in 2006, according to a copy of his green card. By that time, while still married to his first wife, he had started a relationship with Aniushka and had a son with her, Aniushka said. The couple later had another son, married and moved to Virginia, eventually settling in McLean, where Monsalve took up coaching baseball. He took coaching jobs at Jackson-Reed High School in D.C. and Alice Deal Middle School. At night, he would drive for Uber, Lyft and as a private chauffeur to earn extra money.
“He’s caring, he’s loving, he does everything for his family,” Aniushka said.
Aniushka, who is a naturalized U.S. citizen, said the problem with his status surfaced after she encouraged him to apply for citizenship in 2020. His green card application had not disclosed their first born, she said. When he included his sons on the citizenship paperwork, immigration officials noted the discrepancy and denied the application, according to Aniushka and Monsalve’s attorney. In March 2025, DHS moved to put Monsalve in deportation proceedings for allegedly “committing fraud or willful misrepresentation to procure a visa,” the agency said.
On Oct. 19, Monsalve was set to appear before an immigration judge to argue against his deportation.
But a day before the hearing, Monsalve was driving an Uber in Northwest Washington with a large group of passengers when he allegedly ran a red light and was stopped by D.C. police. According to a police report, the officer discovered open containers of alcohol, drugs and a firearm in the car and arrested seven people in the car, including Monsalve.
Monsalve’s family says he had nothing to do with the illicit material found.
Monsalve was taken to D.C. jail and scheduled to appear in D.C. Superior Court the morning of Oct. 19 — the same time he was due to argue his immigration case.
Prosecutors declined to pursue criminal charges, but by then the immigration judge overseeing his case ordered him deported. U.S. Marshals turned Monsalve over to ICE, the agency said.
Aniushka said she waited for him at the courthouse for hours but Monsalve never came out. Eventually, as court staff began to leave for the day, Aniushka said her son asked where his father was.
“‘ICE took him,’ she said a court staffer told them, without offering any explanation. “I never got to see him.”
Monsalve’s lawyers that day filed an appeal to his deportation order.
After his detention, Monsalve was moved to an ICE facility in southern Virginia. Aniushka said she scheduled a time to visit him later that week, but when the day arrived she saw on the ICE detainee locator that he had been moved to the Central Louisiana ICE Processing Center in Jena, Louisiana.
Aniushka said she feels constant worry about the conditions her husband is being held in and that something might happen to him before he has the chance to fight his case.
“I don’t want special treatment,” Aniushka said. “I just want them to follow the rule of law.”
In the days since Monsalve’s detention, some of his players said they have gained more of an understanding of how immigration enforcement can impact communities. Patrick Quinn, 14, said once his mother told him about Monsalve’s detention, a “rush of different things” raced across his mind.
“It was a lot of shock. How could they take someone like Coach A? How could they want to deport him? He’s just such a great guy, on and off of a baseball field. Why would anyone ever want to mess with his life, his family’s life?” Patrick said. “You see it on the news, but when it happens to someone that you know and that you and your community loves, it really makes you think about the issues we have and how sad it is to be without somebody that you truly care about.”
Patrick and other players said they were searching for ways to help Monsalve, whom they called compassionate and caring. If Monsalve can’t return, Patrick said he and a group of fellow high schoolers will likely step up to help Deal’s athletic director coach the team during the spring season.
On Tuesday, the official X account for ICE reposted an article about his detention with the message, “Another sob story headline that conveniently leaves out the facts.”
“Amaury Jose Monsalve Figuera, a CRIMINAL ILLEGAL ALIEN from Venezuela, was arrested for firearms, ammunition, drug, and open-container offenses,” the post said.
Monsalve’s 20-year-old son, Sebasthian, said he was incensed when he came across the post.
“I’ve grown up watching him work hard for our family, while also helping others, especially the kids he coaches,” Sebasthian said. “My dad has never been convicted of a crime, not here, in the United States, not in Venezuela or anywhere else.”
He said ICE was making his dad look like someone he isn’t, damaging his reputation and hurting the family: “At the end of the day, that’s my father and all we want is for him to come home.”
Monsalve’s youngest son, Emmanuel, a first-year student at Shenandoah University who plays on the baseball team there, said, “My father has always been my coach, in life and in baseball.”
“I’m proud to be his son, and it hurts to see his reputation damaged so unfairly.”
Andrew Tiedeman, 13, Liam Novikoff, 12 and Kevin Goldstein, 13, each recalled a moment from last year when Monsalve made them run laps as a disciplinary measure after a few students on the team snickered at the quality of their opponent’s equipment. Monsalve gathered his team in a huddle that day, Liam said, and told his players “that he didn’t care if we won or lost, he only cared if we respected the other teams and if we did a good job representing our community and our school.”
Monsalve’s values were reflected in the way he formed his baseball team at Deal by accepting as many students as possible, creating a sizable roster with a mix of older kids and those newer to baseball, said former players Mark Sikich, 14, and James Goldstein, 15, Kevin’s older brother.
Without Monsalve, Mark Kaprowski, 14, said future baseball teams at Deal would “definitely miss out, not only on the baseball skills, but also the life skills and the memories that they’re going to make with Coach A.”
Each of the players said if they could talk to Coach A, they would tell him that they wanted him back home.
In his voice message, Monsalve said this is what he wanted:
“I just want to come back and see my kids. To go back to the field where I belong. To coach them, to guide them, to teach them how to be good teammates, good kids, good sons, good players and good kids for the community.”
The post ICE detained a middle school coach. His players say they want him home. appeared first on Washington Post.
