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.

“It was kind of a beautiful thing,” the person recalled, even as seven peop

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