Kit Rocha and Courtney Milan have a knack for drawing attention to a cause. The bestselling romance novelists helped raise half a million dollars for Georgia voting rights in 2020. Now, their cause is whistles, because whistles let neighbors alert each other when they see ICE agents abducting people. They’ve helped create a group that’s shipped a half million free 3D-printed whistles to 49 US states — 200,000 of them in the first week of February alone.

Even I print whistles now. It’s the first thing I do each morning after dropping kids at school, and the very last before bed. Usually, I squeeze in a hundred more after dinner.

I print whistles because reality still matters; whistles get neighbors to come running, make sure enough people are recording, so when the regime pretends there’s only one camera angle of Renee Good’s death, we know the truth.

I also make whistles because it’s easy. You can literally do it in your sleep. I’ve made over 12,000 whistles since January 15th with three printers and almost zero optimization. I’ll harvest 300 of them tomorrow morning, 300 in the late afternoon, and another 100 in the evening before I do it all again.

Printing whistles is more cost-effective than drop-shipping them from China. Even if I bought filament at retail prices and paid PG&E’s full exorbitant California electricity rates, I’d be spending around 5 cents per whistle — and the unit economics only get better from there.

Across the country, people are realizing these printers can serve a bigger purpose than building toys and trinkets. Whether someone is looking for 100 whistles to protect friends and family, 200 for a church or school, or 1,000 for a whole neighborhood, requests are flooding in, each one vetted and added to a spreadsheet by volunteers.

No one is told what to do, which whistle to print, or which request to fulfill. These Signal chats feel like a community, building and innovating everything as we go.

The whistles weren’t always 3D-printed. Last summer, some protesters at No Kings rallies already carried whistles to make noise. Following the 2025 raids in Los Angeles, Latino day laborers learned to carry whistles to alert each other about ICE. But Chicago may have proved that 3D-printed whistles could be the future of neighborhood-by-neighborhood organizing.

Emily Hilleren wished she’d been there on October 1st when, she later heard, ICE abducted someone right in front of her nearby school. She was never more than two blocks away the entire time, she tells The Verge, but she never had the opportunity to help. If her neighbors had whistles, they could have blown them and rushed to document the abduction. She decided to make whistles her mission.

She already had a small stash of whistle kits she’d packaged with friends just the previous evening. She’d heard how nearby Little Village had adopted the Los Angeles whistle techniques to warn about ICE raids, how the local Pilsen Arts & Community House had similarly been inspired by LA to create whistle-packing parties last August.

Originally, she figured she’d simply put her whistle kits into a little free library, the kind neighbors use to share books. But the abductions galvanized her to do more. She began hosting her own Whistlemania events at local bars, pairing the Pilsen Arts’ zine with cheap, premade whistles she found on Amazon. She says she spent a couple of thousand dollars, eventually setting up a GoFundMe to recoup her costs.

Soon, the supply of cheap Amazon whistles dried up. But that’s when those bestselling romance novelists entered the picture.

Before Romancelandia showed up for us, it showed up for Emily Hilleren, when Rocha sent some of her very first shipments of 3D-printed whistles to Chicago so the whistle parties could continue. When Border Patrol largely left Chicago, Hilleren returned the favor. She found she still had thousands of whistles piled in her living room, whistles that were needed elsewhere. So she joined forces with Rocha’s online group, which refocused on producing and distributing nationwide.

Like many whistlemakers who were already 3D printing enthusiasts, I started by using whatever leftover filament I had on the shelf. Each 1-kilogram (2.2-pound) roll of plastic produces roughly 500 whistles, depositing the molten string layer by layer to build objects from the ground up. My supply didn’t last long, but I didn’t have to buy more after that — because whenever Kit Rocha and her author friends spread the word that supplies are running low, donors come out of the woodwork. An hour after her Bluesky post, weeks’ worth of filament was on its way to my door.

Nor do whistlemakers necessarily have to pay for postage, because Hilleren brought her GoFundMe along for the ride. Today, she uses those donations to reimburse whistlemakers with shipping receipts, and says she puts any leftover money toward community aid.

So far, donors largely buy filament for us through Amazon wishlists, and Amazon is a company the community has mixed feelings about. But groups like ours have convinced at least one small filament maker, Protopasta, to supply the whistle effort. Operations manager Heidi DiJulio tells me the company’s ready to donate hundreds of rolls of filament, and has today it’s launching a program where donors can support us with its small-batch filament for $20 a roll, competitive with what Amazon charges.

By December, over 20 members had shipped 40,000 whistles. Then ICE came to Minneapolis and killed Renee Good.

“So many people were so upset and they didn’t know what to do, and we could say, here is something you can do,” Rocha tells me. “You can join a print. You can send us filament. You can go find people who need whistles and direct them to us. I think in that moment of pain, that is really when it started to take off.”

A month later, the “Whistle Crew” has over 180 members — sharing their sparkly creations, asking for printer advice, and attempting to improve the group’s processes at almost every hour of the day. Shortly after I joined, one spun up a Whistle Crew Wiki to answer frequently asked questions and help newcomers navigate. Others create new whistle designs that print faster to meet growing demand.

Many stick to printing derivatives of two particular whistles, the ACstudio Micro Bitonal and the Penne. The Micro Bitonal is an incredibly shrill, ear-piercing two-tone whistle that needs only a light blow; the latter uses more air to produce a simpler sound, but has been explicitly tweaked for mass production. But I see lots of hearts and quite a few BakedBeans now, too. Some makers print emergency telephone numbers or slogans atop the whistles, like “Fuck ICE” or “4 Good,” while others beautify them with wavy patterns. I keep it simple by printing most out of multicolor filament.

It’s not entirely foolproof. One morning, I woke up to find my printer fan had mysteriously detached, a frozen explosion of rainbow plastic waiting inside its chamber. Another time, I found a half-printed plate of whistles because my Elegoo Centauri Carbon review unit couldn’t quite tell when it ran out of filament and kept “printing” on air. My Bambu Lab P1P lost two to three whistles per print due to poor bed adhesion, until I added a BIQU Panda Cryogrip Frostbite plate that sticks so well, the whistles make a satisfying pop when I bend the plate to detach them.

There was the day I found a previously working whistle design had started producing entire plates of silent whistles. And like many other whistlemakers, I once made the mistake of thinking my printer could automatically arrange an entire plate of whistles without fusing them all together.

But generally, it works. With the Bambu printers, I can press a button on my phone to start a plate of 105 whistles and expect each to blow loud and shrill. I test one sacrificial whistle from each plate, then throw that whistle away. I don’t even need to use desktop software: Another maker had already created and uploaded the 105-whistle plate to Bambu’s phone app.

3D printers were nowhere near this reliable even five years ago. “It’s pretty mind-blowing now to just take a thing out of a box, do minimal setup and be printing,” says journalist Dan Sinker, also a member of the Whistle Crew. “Like I was printing a plate of whistles probably 30 minutes after plugging it in, and then I never stopped.”

Courtney Milan is the pen name of Heidi Bond, a former US Supreme Court law clerk who wants to protect whistlemakers from possible government bullies. While she says she can’t give legal advice, she helped the group establish ground rules to avoid anything that could be interpreted as a conspiracy to interfere with ICE.

“We’re 3D-printing tools to allow people to exercise their First Amendment right to assemble and to redress the government for grievances,” she says. “We are not trying to enable any other behavior.”

The first rule of Whistle Chat is that anyone posting about illegal activity immediately gets banned. The second is that whistlers are “a loose collective of 3D printing enthusiasts” who merely coordinate with one another, and that admins don’t control the group.

Admins are careful when people ask for the free whistles, too: “If anyone is requesting whistles for a purpose that is not a lawful purpose, we will not fulfill that request.”

It hasn’t happened yet. “If somebody sent us that email, they’re probably a fed trying to entrap us, right? When ordinary people reach out to us, they say, ‘I’m trying to keep my community safe.’”

Bond is worried her rules may not be enough, now that the Trump regime is arresting journalists for exercising their First Amendment rights and claiming Alex Pretti deserved to die for exercising his Second Amendment right. There’s reason to believe they might crack down on whistles, too: They’re already driving MAGA provocateurs up the wall, with one calling them “hearing loss causing machines that terrorists use against ICE.”

Bond calls bullshit: “If we ‘impede ICE’ simply by being there and observing them, the thing that is happening is not us impeding ICE in the exercise of its power, it is ICE being too ashamed to do unlawful acts when being watched by people.” She says it’s time to take a stand, that “the freedoms we enjoy will go away if we do not exercise them.”

Sometimes, I think: Whistles don’t stop bullets. They didn’t save Renee Good. They didn’t save Alex Pretti. “It doesn’t help. It doesn’t really serve a purpose other than shame,” one woman tells me, and for a brief moment, I wonder if that’s true.

But when I share my thoughts with Rocha and other whistlers, they say the whistles are also about human connection, about sharing and displaying a physical symbol that you’re here for your neighbors, knowing you’re not alone, starting a dialogue that can lead to phone trees and mutual aid networks, finding power when you feel powerless.

“Once I started giving out whistles, I started seeing how when you directly help somebody it impacts not just others but yourself, because a lot of anxiety is wrapped up in the loss of control,” a man named Matt from Minneapolis tells me.

America Garcia, a first-generation Mexican American, says she felt the power firsthand. She was packing her car one day and heard honking, saw ICE on the corner of her street, immediately feared for her immigrant mother, and started blowing her whistle. “It was this burst of adrenaline,” she tells me, “and once I started hearing the collective whistling on my block, it felt even more powerful.”

While ICE detained the two men they were after, she hopes it may have saved other vulnerable immigrants who heard the whistles and took it as a sign not to leave their homes.

Maureen “Mo” Ryan, a contributing editor at Vanity Fair who introduced Rocha to Hilleren and carries a whistle at all times, says it makes her feel “like maybe I’m not totally helpless if something terrible happens to my neighbors,” because “I can alert others and they might be able to stay safe even if I can’t prevent what’s happening in front of me.”

Hilleren says, “My neighbors are being snatched, they’re being ransomed, they’re being separated from their families, and I can’t stop it. But knowing that I’m trying and seeing all the other good people who are trying, that reminds me that a better world is possible.”

Besides, sometimes shame does work right away. I think of the powerful words of Dan Sinker, describing a moment in Chicago when the whistles, and the people they summoned to witness, stopped ICE in its tracks.

“A report rang out that a child was hiding, and people converged. Whistles around necks, a half-dozen in moments. One heard whistles when dropping her own child off at school. Another rode up on a bike. Everyone unsure of what to do except to do what any parent would do: ensure a child is safe,” Sinker wrote. “The child was safe.”

Bond says that while whistles may not stop bullets, they can stop bullies by making their actions socially unacceptable.

“The whistle says, ‘We will stand up and we will watch, and we will judge you and we will remember, and we will witness. And you will not get away with it,’” says Bond. “‘You may think you’re doing it right now, but you will not get away with it.’ That’s what a whistle says.”