Illegal immigrant Leonal Moreno recently posted an instructional video on TikTok guiding fellow immigrants on how to leverage U.S. squatting laws to safely occupy abandoned homes. Moreno said that his goal is to avoid having to become a “public burden” to U.S. taxpayers by finding his own shelter in abandoned places. Some viewers, however, perceive a threat in Moreno’s video, and warn that illegal immigrants might intend to abuse these laws. Although the requirements for squatters to claim legal ownership of a home are highly prohibitive, their rights to seek temporary refuge in an unoccupied home are generally more protected.
Straight Arrow News contributor Newt Gingrich warns of an outright invasion of illegal immigrants who might try to occupy vacant homes while families are on vacation, and suggests that they might steal and sell off the possessions inside. Gingrich indicates that loopholes in existing tenant and squatter laws should be patched up to prevent what he says will be a nationwide squatting crisis.
Squatting is going to become one of the major issues of the next few months. Squatting occurs when people move into a building that is empty and take it over. They’re in effect – they used to be called squatters – and recently on TikTok, an illegal immigrant who has about 600,000 followers was urging all of his fellow illegal immigrants to go out and find a house and take it over.
Their theory is simple. Let’s say you go on vacation and you leave your home. Well, if you’re gone for very long, these folks might move in, literally, physically occupy it. And when you get back home, they’re going to say, “Wait a second, this is our house now! We’ve taken it over.” They’re in effect squatting on your property.
This has become a serious issue, such a serious issue that the state of Florida has already adopted much stronger anti-squatting laws to stop people from doing this, because as you can imagine, in Florida, during the season, there are probably a million people who come from Canada and from the northern states, and then go back home, leaving property behind that’s open, they own it, they think it’s totally safe. But technically, these guys can come in, sit down and try to occupy it.