Illegal alien who pushed illegal border crossings and squatting, deported

Consider the case of Leonel Moreno, a Venezuelan who slipped across the southern border and thought he’d stumbled into a land of limitless largesse. 

This illegal alien took to TikTok—where else?—to flaunt a fistful of dollar bills, crow about federal handouts, and urge his fellow border-jumpers to squat in America’s abandoned homes. “I didn’t cross the Rio Grande to work like a slave,” he announced, as if the United States owed him a living for the mere act of showing up. 

Well, Moreno’s grand tour has come to an end—he’s been deported back to Venezuela, and not a moment too soon.

This 27-year-old exemplar of entitlement waltzed into Eagle Pass, Texas, on April 23, 2022, under the Biden administration’s porous watch. Released into the country’s interior, he promptly thumbed his nose at Immigration and Customs Enforcement, skipping check-ins like a man too busy to be bothered. 

It wasn’t until March 2024 that the authorities caught up with him in Columbus, Ohio—a full two years of free rein. Deportation was ordered on September 9, 2024, but there was a hitch: Venezuela’s dictator, Nicolas Maduro, had petulantly slammed the door on deportation flights earlier that year, peeved by economic sanctions. 

Only after President Trump took office in 2025 did Caracas relent, and Moreno was bundled onto a plane.

Even then, he couldn’t go quietly. 

This illegal alien kicked up such a fuss on the flight that he had to be cordoned off with extra security—details are murky, but one imagines a tantrum befitting his TikTok bravado. Back in Venezuela, Diosdado Cabell, the grandly titled Minister of Interior, Justice and Peace, rolled out the welcome mat, saying Moreno was “welcome” home. 

One suspects the irony was lost on both men.

Meanwhile, the Trump administration is wrestling with a larger mess: deporting members of Tren de Aragua, a vicious Venezuelan gang-cum-terror outfit. The President dusted off the Alien Enemies Act to fast-track their removal—a rare bit of decisiveness—but the Left, predictably, cried foul. 

A federal judge, appointed by Obama and marinated in progressive sanctimony, slapped an injunction on the move. That ruling was recently upheld by another judge, this one a Democratic donor and Obama campaign volunteer. The pattern is as tiresome as it is transparent.

So here we are: Moreno is gone, but the system that let him linger remains. A nation that can’t control its borders or eject its freeloaders is a nation in name only. “I didn’t cross the Rio Grande to work like a slave,” he said. Nor, it seems, to respect the country that took him in.

Good riddance to bad rubbish.

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