Venezuelan influencer, Leonal Moreno, urges his followers to show financial support of migrant teen's charges against Times Square shooting.
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Venezuelan migrant, Leonal Moreno, posted a video to his social media urging his over 300,000 followers to "unite" and pay the fines of a 15-year-old migrant who allegedly shot a tourist in Times Square earlier this month.
"I invite you to find [his] mother and [for] all of us to unite to pay the fines [so] that the young Venezuelan feels that he’s not alone during difficult moments. Remember that up there there’s a God who sees everything [down here]," the Venezuelan TikToker said.
He continued,"An entire nation [is] on top of him instead of helping him - remember that the young man is going to be released. And he will be released, do you know why? Because he’s underage."
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Venezuelan migrant, Leonel Moreno's video about Rivas-Figueroa's charges. (TikTok @leitooficial_25)
"You don’t know when God is going to put you in a situation like the one this young man is in," Moreno continued in the clip, referencing the attempted murder charges against teenager Jesus Alejandro Rivas-Figueroa, who’s being tried as an adult for his actions on February 8th.
"Let’s unite forces so that this child can be free and has an opportunity," he captioned his 90-second TikTok video in Spanish, which has since garnered 2.5 million views.
The comments section of the video collected mixed sentiments, with one user calling Moreno a "clown", while another wrote, "He broke the law, and he should stay in jail or go back to his country."
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Leonel Moreno, speaking about his reasons for coming to America. (TikTok @leitooficial_25)
Moreno’s content focuses around his lifestyle and how he earns an income by begging strangers on the streets and living off of money distributed by the government.
In another video posted February 21st, Moreno expressed his intention behind migrating to the United States, stating, "You came to the United States to work, and I came to vacation, look at the difference. You and I didn’t come with the same purpose. You came to the United States to pay the taxes that you didn’t pay in Venezuela."
The same day, the migrant posted another video, admitting, "I confess that I don’t like to work because it gives me allergies. You work, I don’t, but in the end, neither of us have money. They keep criticizing us because I live off of taxes that you pay monthly."
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President Biden and migrants attempting to cross into the U.S. (Getty Images)
The New York Post reported that the Venezuelan TikToker lives in Columbus, Ohio with his partner and their daughter.
Manhattan Institute fellow and Venezuelan native, Daniel Di Martino, told The New York Post, "Americans should be outraged to see how someone can come… and abuse the laws and benefits of America. Sadly, he’s just one of many who are ripping off the taxpayer because of our own badly written laws that allow them to collect some welfare and take years to decide asylum cases that likely will be denied."
As the migrant crisis continues across the country, the violent actions of those like Rivas-Figueroa and Jose Antonio Ibarra bring a plethora of questions to the surface regarding the state of immigration and the Biden administration’s willingness to address the ongoing crisis.
President Biden recently said, "Congress has had a long, proud history — a bipartisan history — on immigration reform and abiding by our international treaty obligations, which we signed related to immigration. These reforms made America a nation of laws, a nation of immigrants and the strongest economy in the world. But something changed. Over time, our laws and our resources haven't kept up with our immigration system, and it's broken. And our politics has failed to fix it."
Alba Cuebas-Fantauzzi is a freelance production assistant at Fox News Digital.
