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.
Experimenting with different whistles in my garage, including a full plate of Federico’s Strong Whistle. Photo: Sean Hollister / The Verge
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.
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