The Trump administration said “adios” to an illegal immigrant from Venezuela who garnered a massive online following by posting videos of him flashing stacks of cash and urging migrants to “invade” American homes and take them over under squatters’ rights laws.
Leonel Moreno, 26, told his audience he planned to make a business out of selling them for a profit.
“He has been deported,” the Trump administration announced Friday on its @RapidResponse47 X account.
FREELOADING MIGRANT INFLUENCER MOCKS US TAXPAYERS WHO ‘WORK LIKE SLAVES’ WHILE WAVING CASH IN LATEST VIDEOS
In his videos, he mocked U.S. taxpayers and even other immigrants who work for a living, alternately waving stacks of hundred-dollar bills, crying, singing or posing with an infant with mucus running out of his nose.
“I didn’t cross the Rio Grande to work like a slave,” Moreno said in Spanish, according to a translation of his videos. “I came to the U.S. to mark my territory.”
He bragged about raking in cash via TikTok as well as entitlement payments from U.S. taxpayers. He claimed that his family had received $350 a week in government handouts since entering the U.S. illegally and that at one point he was raking in as much as $1,000 a week with his viral videos.
PROPOSED BILL IN CONGRESS TO COMBAT ILLEGAL IMMIGRANTS SQUATTING WOULD MAKE PRACTICE A DEPORTABLE OFFENSE
“You’re hurt because I make more than you without much work while you work like slaves, understand?” he said in one of his videos. “That’s the difference between you and me. I’m always going to make lots of money without much work, and you’re always going to be exploited and miserable and insignificant.”
TikTok eventually shut down his account, which had amassed about 500,000 followers. He continued to post videos on Facebook and Instagram until his arrest last year in Ohio.
ICE picked him up after his online profile exploded, but he spent months in custody under the Biden administration. Now, he is gone.
A federal judge ordered his removal in September, but the Venezuelan government refused to accept deportation flights under the Biden administration.
He had originally been released into the U.S. in 2022 under the border parole system after crossing into the country illegally near Eagle Pass, Texas.
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