Twin Cities community members distributing free, 3D-printed ICE alert whistles
At a small toy shop on Grand Avenue in St. Paul, Minnesota, customers aren't just buying board games and plushies. They're grabbing handfuls of tiny plastic whistles and walking out without paying a cent.
Mischief Toys has become one of the most visible hubs in a growing Twin Cities effort to hand out free 3D printed whistles that activists say can alert neighbors when Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents are nearby.
"We've been giving away thousands of 3D printed whistles," said co-owner Abigail Adelsheim-Marshall. "We started doing it after Thanksgiving when ICE really started cracking down in Chicago and the whistle strategy first started showing signs of success and we were kind of giving away a trickle. Then ever since ICE has been hitting the Twin Cities and Minnesota really hard, we've been giving away upwards of a thousand a week."
The whistles are small, often brightly colored and come in all kinds of shapes. Some are double-barreled. Some are barely bigger than a paper clip. Others are printed with a phone number that connects callers to volunteers tracking enforcement activity.
"One of our employees owns a 3D printer and she used to make all of them for us. She's still making many, but she is at capacity, so we are now crowdsourcing them from around the Twin Cities," Adelsheim-Marshall said. "So many 3D printers are donating, which is why we have a million different designs on the whistles right now."
Adelsheim-Marshall said the store is currently limiting people to 20 whistles per person so they can stretch their supply as far as possible. She would like to be able to equip community organizations with larger batches or reach a day when they're no longer needed.
"Hopefully someday we won't need them anymore, which would be great," she said.
For now, demand is outpacing supply. At the other end of the effort is Kaleb Lutterman, a self-described "maker" who has turned his hobby into a kind of production line in his Minneapolis home.
"For a little over a month now, I've been 3D printing emergency whistles," he said. "So these are really small loud whistles specifically to help with you know alerting locals to ICE presence. You probably heard them in any sort of coverage videos of what's happening here in the cities, people blowing them. So that's really what it is just to just something to say, you know, 'Hey there's some activity over here.' You know, let the neighbors come out of their houses and see what's going on."
Lutterman prints on a Bambu Labs P1S and says he can fit 100 whistles on a single plate. Each run takes about seven and a half hours. He estimates he can make roughly 800 whistles for around $15 worth of filament, depending on what he buys and in what quantity.
"It's hard to keep up with demand," he said. "There's a group of us in the cities. We're all kind of in a group chat together, and anytime we find somebody that's printing more themselves, we try to add them to this group chat."
That informal network is how Mischief Toys gets restocked.
"They reached out to me and said I need 1,000 and this is after I just went through 800 of them this last weekend," Lutterman said. "So I said, you know, I don't have 1,000, but I have 300 and then I reached out to the group, and they were all able to pitch in about 100 each or so, so we got Mischief restocked."
Lutterman says he isn't accepting money for the whistles at this point.
"This is something I can pocket and do for the community with my own money," he said, adding that it could change if requests for large orders keep coming in.
Organizers and volunteers say the whistles are meant to be an attention grabber and a way to quickly draw witnesses and cameras when enforcement activity happens in neighborhoods.
"I think people are feeling helpless and this is something you can do," Adelsheim-Marshall said. "It helps alert neighbors and get a crowd going, which helps document the illegal activity that ICE is doing and gives anyone who's in danger from ICE a chance to hide or shelter in place. So, it is, I wish we could be doing more, but it is the best strategy that we have found so far."
Critics of the tactic, including federal officials, argue the whistles won't stop ICE from making arrests and say the agency is targeting people they describe as threats.
Lutterman recently saw that criticism firsthand in a social media post he says came from the Department of Homeland Security.
"It says your whistles won't stop or hinder ICE from arresting criminal, illegal alien sex abusers, murderers, gang members and more off the Minneapolis street," he read aloud.
Lutterman says he doesn't see himself as someone trying to interfere with law enforcement.
"I feel like they want me to be intimidated, but you know a whistle is not going to do anything to them, just like they can't do much to me," he said. "It's not going to stop me from supporting my community. They're not from here, I am, so they can be as mad as they want about it."
He says his concern is about how immigration enforcement is playing out on the ground.
"Even if you're someone that thinks that there should be immigration enforcement, I can agree to tha,t but what they're doing here is harmful to the community," Lutterman said. "If they're supposed to be making this city safe, I don't feel safe. My neighbors don't feel safe. So if a whistle can help with that, that's the least I can do."
Back at Mischief Toys, the whistles sit in small bins near the counter, free for anyone who walks in and asks. Adelsheim-Marshall says they're not interested in how loud the debate gets online, just in getting a simple tool into people's hands.
"Whether or not you think it is legitimate for ICE to track people down and deport them, what they are doing now is blatantly illegal," she said, describing her view of current enforcement tactics. "Immigrants, documented or otherwise, are people and we should treat them like people."
For the people printing and passing them out, a piece of plastic that costs pennies has become a way to feel a little less helpless and a little more connected when the sound of a whistle cuts through a Twin Cities street.