When People Showed Up: Jeremy Watch Lorenzo’s Story Here

Jeremy Lorenzo did not know if people would come.

He was setting up for a constitutional observer training the day Alex Pretti was shot. News of violence in South Minneapolis reached him as he prepared the room. The fear was already heavy. The stakes already felt unbearable. And still, people were arriving.

At the start of his trainings, Jeremy often asked a simple question: Why are you here?

That day, when he tried to answer it himself, the words caught him.

Immigrants like me are under attack, he told them. We are all under attack. I wanted to show up and do what I could to fight it.

Then he started crying.

Someone in the room told him, “It’s okay, we’re there for you. It’s why we’re all here.”

That moment stayed with him because he had not been sure people would respond that way. He did not know if ordinary people, in a moment of fear and violence, would still choose to show up.

Now he knows.

“When things are on the line,” Jeremy said, “regular people are still gonna show up.”

Jeremy was born in the San Francisco Bay Area and moved through different places before settling in Minnesota. When asked about his community, he answered honestly. Sometimes, he said, it felt like he did not have a tight-knit community. He was, in his words, “sort of out there.”

That changed through organizing.

His political awakening came after the 2024 election. Jeremy said the country he thought he lived in was not what he believed it was. It was one thing to know that intellectually. It was another thing to feel it in his bones.

That feeling pushed him into action.

He had done activism before in Wisconsin, where he learned an important lesson: if communities want to protect people, they need power. They need organization. They need people willing to do the steady work, not just react after harm has already happened.

After the 2024 election, Jeremy knew attacks on immigrant communities were coming. His parents are immigrants. That history is part of him. When Indivisible began forming teams focused on different issue areas, he chose immigrant rights.

“I knew from the first Trump term that attacks on immigrants were going to happen in some form or fashion,” he said.

But Jeremy and his team also knew they had to be careful about how they showed up. Many of the people in their organization were older, white, retired, and not directly impacted. They did not want to “front run” immigrant allies. They did not want to speak over people closest to the harm.

Joining the Immigrant Defense Network helped them find their place.

IDN connected Jeremy’s team to directly impacted communities, organizers, and immigrant rights leaders who could name what was needed. Instead of guessing, they listened. Instead of trying to lead from the outside, they found a useful role.

For Jeremy, that role became training.

In the summer and fall before Operation Metro Surge fully escalated, constitutional observer trainings began. Jeremy’s group took the training and then started offering it themselves. They met in library conference rooms and free community spaces. At first, he wondered how many people would come. Other organizations had already trained many people earlier in the year.

Then the demand grew.

As rumors and reports of enforcement activity intensified, the trainings became more urgent. The group moved from offering them every couple of weeks to holding them as often as twice a week during the height of the surge. People wanted to know how to observe, document, respond, and protect their neighbors without escalating harm.

They knew the Twin Cities could be targeted.

“We’ve got to prepare,” Jeremy remembered thinking.

When Operation Metro Surge intensified, the fear became personal. Jeremy is a U.S. citizen, but as a person of color and the child of immigrants, he felt the danger in his body. He heard reports of people of color being pulled over and detained. He stopped wanting to drive alone. His wife drove him to doctor’s appointments. Their family stopped going out as much. They used to take their children to the library and the children’s museum on weekends. During the surge, they mostly stayed inside.

“As it got further and further into the surge,” he said, “it just kept getting scarier and scarier.”

Still, fear did not stop people from building systems of care.

In Jeremy’s neighborhood, people mobilized to support rapid response. When alerts came in, neighbors showed up. Sometimes a dozen people would arrive quickly, trying to understand what was happening, watching suspicious vehicles, and making sure no one was alone.

He also saw mutual aid take shape in powerful ways. Near his home, teachers at local schools organized grocery delivery for families who were afraid to leave their homes. Because educators needed to protect student privacy, neighbors would drop food at a location without knowing which family it would reach. After school, teachers picked it up and delivered it directly.

That, to Jeremy, was community defense.

Not always dramatic. Not always visible. But deeply organized. Deeply human.

He saw people giving rides to neighbors who were afraid to drive. He saw dispatchers stay on calls for hours, directing responders and making sure coverage existed where it was needed. He saw people set aside their normal routines, again and again, to protect people they might never meet.

“It was just amazing to see,” he said.

And as the danger increased, so did the number of people willing to act.

After violence shook the community, Jeremy expected fear might keep people away. Instead, more people came to be trained. More people wanted to know what to do. More people understood that silence was not an option.

“Rather than scaring people,” he said, “it was a spark.”

That spark changed him.

Jeremy says the experience showed him he had more to give. He had a full-time job. He had children. He had responsibilities. But he also realized there was time and space in his life that could be devoted to this work, time that might otherwise have been filled by distractions or routine.

It also gave him more optimism than he had before. He did not know how the Twin Cities would respond. He did not know if people would fill the streets, attend trainings, answer rapid response calls, deliver groceries, or protect strangers.

Then they did.

Before Operation Metro Surge, Jeremy says he was living in Minnesota. Afterward, he was proud to live here.

He saw that the federal government could terrorize cities, but organized communities could change the conditions on the ground. Enforcement did not disappear, but the way agents operated shifted because people were watching, responding, and refusing to let them move unseen.

“I didn’t know we had that influence,” he said. “But we did.”

The future Jeremy is fighting for is a country where everyone has equal rights. A country where everyone is equal under the law. A country where those responsible for harm are held accountable. A country where people feel safe, welcome, and loved, and where everyone can pursue their dreams.

He knows the United States has never fully lived up to that promise. But he still believes that promise is worth fighting for.

“My name is Jeremy Lorenzo,” he said. “I’m a resident of Minneapolis, and I showed up as an organizer and trainer of Constitutional Observers during Metro Surge.”