Nicolle Wallace honored the life and legacy of beloved New York City youth baseball coach Youman Wilder after his family announced that the 63-year-old died unexpectedly earlier this month. Wilder, founder of the Harlem Baseball Hitting Academy, gained national prominence last year after he intervened when immigration agents approached a group of his students who were practicing in a local park and began to question them.

During an appearance on “Deadline: White House” last July, Wilder, who also held a master’s degree in law, called the questioning from agents “inappropriate” and advised his players to “implement their Fifth Amendment right.”

Wilder told Wallace that a majority of his teams consisted of Black and Latino players. Through his organization, he helped more than 400 young men earn college baseball scholarships and developed several major-league players.

The MS NOW host described Wilder as a “local legend” and said that with his death, “the baseball community has lost an iconic and now-famous coach and mentor, and this country has lost a patriot who used America’s pastime to show what this country looks like at its best.”

“For me, Youman was the first person who I saw do something that the powerful people refused to do in that first year of Trump’s presidency,” Wallace said, noting that the Brooklyn native “stood up against ICE when law firms were capitulating basically by the day, when universities were cutting deals basically by the week,” and when Republicans “were falling in line behind military troops in the streets of American cities, behind ICE raids that were sweeping up American citizens, behind detentions of young children at the Dilley Detention Center.”

The “Deadline: White House” host said she believed that Wilder, with his act of bravery that day, “forced people to answer the question: What would you do?”

You can watch Wallace’s full segment in the clip at the top of the page.

The post Nicolle Wallace remembers ‘patriot’ youth baseball coach who stood up to ICE appeared first on MS NOW.

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From MS Now.