A brash Venezuelan migrant with nearly 300,000 social media followers is urging his comrades to “unite” in support of the 15-year-old from his home country who allegedly fired at cops after blasting a tourist in the leg in Times Square.
Leonel Moreno, who goes by @leitooficial_25 on TikTok and Instagram and appears to live in a suburb of Columbus, Ohio with his partner and their three-month-old daughter, has also posted videos bragging about earning money by begging on the streets, and collecting government handouts.
“I invite you to look for [his] mother and all of us join to pay the bail, so that this young Venezuelan feels that you’re not alone in difficult times, but remembers that there is a God up there who sees. Today it could be him, tomorrow it could be you…He did something wrong, it’s okay,” Moreno says in a Feb. 12 TikTok seen 2 million times.
“You don’t know when God is going to put you in a situation like the one this young man is in,” he bemoans in the clip, apparently referring to Jesus Alejandro Rivas-Figueroa, who’s been charged as an adult for attempted murder after opening fire in the Crossroads of the World on Feb. 8.
“We are going to unite forces so that this child is free and has an opportunity,” Moreno captioned the one-and-a-half-minute long video, which is in Spanish.
Moreno’s brazen plea ignores that a Manhattan judge ordered Rivas-Figueroa held without bail.
In another video, the so-called influencer, who has been in the United States since September, claims he made $275 from “three hours [of] asking for money at traffic lights.”
“The return is to ask for money, boy,” he says in the Nov. 8 video posted to Instagram.
“[In the USA] everything is given away [if] you know how to look,” Moreno says in a Jan. 7 Instagram clip, in which he brandishes a card labeled “MIC Ohio,” which he says affords “nine pots of milk” at the grocery store.
Moreno, and his message, are everything wrong with America’s broken immigration system, said Daniel Di Martino, a Manhattan Institute fellow and a Venezuelan native.
“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,” Di Martino said.
In response to Moreno’s videos, Councilman Joseph Borelli (R-Staten Island) deadpanned: “This is exactly the type of attitude that is really helping the migrants win the hearts and minds of New Yorkers to their cause.”
Added Councilman Robert Holden (D-Queens): “We absolutely don’t need to start importing criminals or boosting crowdsourcing campaigns to spring them from jail. The influencer better start warning his followers: don’t come to the United States to commit crimes.”
Moreno did not respond to The Post’s requests for comment.
Migrants from Moreno’s homeland have been pouring into the U.S. since the middle of 2022.
In the Big Apple, a blood-thirsty Venezuelan street gang called Tren de Aragua has already extended its criminal empire by recruiting among new migrants at shelters to set up cellphone robbery groups — and then trafficking the phones to Colombia to be resold.
In January, Venezuela stopped allowing flights with deported migrants from the U.S. and Mexico back into the country.
