surviving the ICE age

It is the 10th year of the Turbulent Era, and I have been fairly busy — doing my part in community care work while navigating some unfortunate chronic health issues has taken a lot of my writing time for the early part of 2026. I’ve got a migraine condition, and it is easy to trigger when something else goes wrong (bad air quality, dental pain, insurance/medication shenanigans all have done their part to disrupt.)

As the world watches our friends in Minnesota deal with an all-out assault by ICE & CBP, an escalation even from the terror foisted upon LA & Chicago in the fall, I have, like many others, been in motion. One of the grand affordances of this time is being able to communicate quickly across distance, and learning lessons from each other simply requires reaching out and asking for the wisdom of those who faced earlier surges. So when ICE agents kidnapped parents in Ypsilanti at the end of January, stalking behind school buses, it became clear that our time for planning was ending and the next phase of this civic crisis has reached our area.

I adapted one of the wonderful Whistle Zines that the folks at Pilsen Community Books created, adding the number for MIRA, our local grassroots ICE watch hotline. I’ve helped to try and direct folks who are newly activated to the veteran organizers working in our community, and provided as many resources and tactics developed by comrades in other places to make sure we had every tool available to keep our neighbors safe. But when I think about what’s been my own biggest impact on this campaign, it will likely be found in the 120db whistles that people are now armed with.

I wrote in October about the start of making these whistles, and the conversations happening with friends and folks in Chicago as we determined what would be most efficient, cost effective, and impactful. There was very little that it felt like I could do, as I watched the ethnic cleansing roll across cities, except work on whistles. Every time I found my concentration lagging, struggling to focus on meetings or zoom calls that felt desperately less urgent than the families being separated, I could at least start another set of prints, pack another envelope, make more plans. I made some new artwork, and started giving it away to local business owners.

I’m not physically suited for frontline efforts, but this was something I could do. Other whistle workers were along for the ride, distributed across the country, making our efforts less lonely. In a couple months, I got good enough at managing the prints from my machine that I was able to print 20 at once, then 50; I’m now generally running with minimal downtime, making 2-3 batches of 100 whistles each every 8 hours. I finish each work day, dragging myself through tasks, and pull the build plate out and dump the latest batch into a box to sort later. When I’m watching TV, I’ve got a little counting tray set up, and count out batches of whistles when I’m not folding zines until my fingers ache. I take my meds, wade through the dark hallway and set up the next batch; I’ll return again before dawn, and start it over again.

In the 5 days immediately after this escalation, I delivered 2,200 of my 3d-printed whistles to folks around Washtenaw County, to be packed into kits and distributed out to patrol groups. Folks were surprised and thrilled to learn there were so many available, so quickly. I didn’t quite know how to talk about the nauseating anticipation of these moments I’ve had. The moral injury of witnessing these horrors, the anger of feeling the need to step into these roles when our electeds were unprepared or unwilling, and some small bitterness at the slow discipline of preparation the task required. Months of stress, moments of despair and prayers of fervent hope fused with rainbow-colored thermoplastics.

Many of us are struggling with the mental aspects of what we are asked to do, who we are needed to be in this moment; I won’t deny the night terrors, the cracked molars, the irritability that grows from the need to continue doing capitalism while children are being caged. But every whistle is a weaving, and every conversation I’ve had around them has forcibly pulled people into the reality activists have been living in for a while now. I watch each school walkout with pride, and appreciate the tangible reality of my contributions with these shiny, silly, effective talismans on store counters, lanyards and keychains. It is a sustaining thing, and a reminder that action is an antidote to despair. Maybe one day, when we’ve ended the ICE age, they’ll be a part of the story of how we all got over.