Last November, as the federal occupation of Chicago was winding down and the occupation of Minneapolis had not yet begun, I wrote a piece called "Whistle Up," about the strategic use of whistles by anti-ICE observers and organizers that included advice on how to procure whistles for your own community. This post serves as a sequel and update, written three months later.

You've heard the whistles by now. Either because you're living in a place where they've become necessary or because you've seen video, endless video, of the streets of Minneapolis and the people who are out there blowing whistles to alert their neighbors of the presence of ICE and Border Patrol. The enduring sound of right now is the shrill wail of a chorus of whistles.

Inevitably when you talk about whistles on social media someone thinks they are hilarious in offering up the observation that if you really wanted to annoy these goons, you should use a vuvuzela, the plastic horn favored by South African soccer fans. But whistles aren't an annoyance system, they are an alert system. They are an alert system built entirely at street-level and massively deployed to serve two purposes: bring your neighbors out to witness the abuses of ICE and to let those that are more at risk to know to stay in or to find shelter immediately.

There's a simple code system that goes along with the whistles: short staccato bursts if ICE is seen in the area and long blows if they're actively snatching someone (though, honestly, in my experience you just blow like hell). It is a remarkably simple and effective system. Talk to anyone on the ground and they will tell that it has saved people, every single day. I have seen it work repeatedly.

The more whistles out there—the more whistles in people's hands, on their person, at all times—the more effective this system is, and so getting whistles to people has become a massive community effort. Across the country there are whistle packing parties happening in church basements and bars and nonprofit offices and pretty much anywhere else that can hold some people, some tables, and boxes of whistles, zines, and bags to put them all in.

When I wrote "Whistle Up" last fall, I spent a lot of time writing about strategies for procuring whistles in bulk, a process that became more challenging the longer the occupation of Chicago continued, because everyone was trying to do it and the limited number of mostly-Chinese manufacturers had not planned for a sudden and massive run on their supply. What began in early October as being able to get whistles for about 10-15 cents a piece, was up to 30-50 cents per whistle by the time I stopped looking in late November. Over the course of the fall, I paid out hundreds of dollars to put a thousand or so whistles out onto the streets. It was crucial, but it was slow and unpredictable (I'm still occasionally getting a random box of 20 whistles I ordered off Ali Express six months ago) and it wasn't an expense I could shoulder forever.

By late fall, there were a few people in Chicago who had moved from sourcing whistles to manufacturing them themselves with a 3d printer. When I talked with one of them who explained that they were making whistles a few dozen at a time and they were paying cents for materials for them I was intrigued.

A month later I bought a printer. It cost less than what I'd shelled out for whistles.

Yesterday I printed my 10,000th whistle.

I wasn't alone in doing it.

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