When masked federal officers showed up on a street corner in Corona, Queens, earlier this month and started arresting Latino men, seemingly stopped at random, volunteers alerted through Signal chats and direct messages rushed to the scene.

The feds were gone, along with the men they’d detained, and the volunteers went through the area, passing out whistles and know-your-rights information as they warned people about the street raid.

The alert proved timely: the officers returned twice more that afternoon. By then, neighbors were warning each other by blowing the whistles, according to a volunteer with Queens Neighborhoods United, one of many small groups that have begun tracking ICE activity in recent months. (snip)

And the code is not complicated. Short bursts indicate an ICE sighting. Long whistles indicate agents making arrests. If you hear the whistle and you’re undocumented, said Hu, “you hide. And if you’re somebody who’s not, you go to the street.”

Hu is among a number of New Yorkers who are stocking up and passing out whistles in recent weeks.

“The day after the Canal Street raid I ordered a thousand,” said Carina Kaufman-Gutierrez, the deputy director of the Street Vendor Project, which has started handing out whistles to street vendors, along with know-your-rights materials, and information on how to distinguish federal immigration agents from city police or Sanitation officers.

The truth is much more bleak: Avelo’s ICE flights appear to be a fiasco, defined by the poor planning, cruel treatment, and serious safety lapses endemic to “ICE Air,” the network of charter carriers and military planes that transport shackled migrants to detention facilities and out of the country. Just this past week, a mid-flight emergency loss of cabin pressure left six people injured. (snip)

But flight attendants for ICE charters say this is unlikely on ICE flights, because all adult migrants (and some minors) are shackled with handcuffs and leg irons attached to a chain around their waists—regardless of gender, age, disability, criminal background, or lack thereof. Seventy-one percent of migrants in ICE custody in September had no criminal convictions.

Migrants deemed unruly can also be wrapped in a restraint device similar to a straitjacket and/or have a hood placed over their head, making evacuation all but impossible.