In Support of Application for Asylum (Form I-589)
I, Alan David Coronado Dávila, declare under penalty of perjury under the laws
of the United States that the following is true and correct to the best of my knowledge:
I. PERSONAL BACKGROUND
My name is Alan David Coronado Dávila. I was born on November 16, 2002, in Venezuela. I am a Venezuelan citizen. I am the son of Brigzen Aroldo Coronado Lobo and María Dalia Dávila Moreno, both of whom file their own separate asylum applications. My younger brother, Kevin David Coronado Dávila, is included as a derivative beneficiary in my father’s application. I am unmarried and have no children.
I arrived in the United States on October 4, 2018, through John F. Kennedy International Airport in New York. I was fifteen years old at the time. I have lived continuously in the United States since that date and have not returned to Venezuela. I am now twenty-two years old. My entire adult life — every job I have held, every relationship I have built, every experience that has shaped who I am as an adult — has taken place in the United States.
I completed high school in New York City. After graduating in 2022, I began working. I currently work in Bozeman, Montana, where I have lived since late 2024. I have a serious and stable relationship with a person who lives in Bozeman. My family is here: my father, my mother, my uncle, my aunt, and my cousin, with whom I am close. I have more family in the United States than I would have in Venezuela. The life I have built here is the only adult life I know.
II. MY MEMORIES OF VENEZUELA AND WHY I LEFT
I left Venezuela when I was fifteen years old. I did not leave as an adult who had built a life there and chosen to start over somewhere else. I left as a teenager, accompanying my family, at an age when Venezuela was still the country of my childhood — not a place I had navigated independently as an adult.
What I remember of Venezuela is a mixture of ordinary childhood memories and experiences that, even then, told me something was deeply wrong with the country I was growing up in. I remember the violence in public spaces as something unremarkable, something people adapted to rather than confronted. One image that has stayed with me is witnessing a robbery on a school transport vehicle: a motorcyclist pulled up alongside the bus, reached through an open window, and took a Nintendo game device from the hands of a girl sitting near me. No one intervened. No one called for help. It happened in seconds, in plain view, and then it was over. That kind of incident was not exceptional in the Venezuela I grew up in. It was routine.
I also remember a serious injury I suffered as a teenager, shortly before my family left Venezuela. I sustained a deep laceration to my hand that severed several tendons and left my hand immobile. What I remember most clearly is not the injury itself, but what happened afterward: the difficulty of finding immediate help. A neighbor took me to a fire station, thinking it would be the fastest way to get medical attention. The firefighters covered the wound but were not equipped to treat it, and no one arranged for me to be taken to a hospital. I went home with my hand still immobile, without having received real medical care. I still wonder, when I think about it, why that happened — why a serious injury did not result in immediate medical attention, and why the people trying to help could not find a clear path to get me the care I needed.
The process of receiving proper treatment required traveling from Guarenas, where we lived, into Caracas, navigating the public transit system including the metro, to reach the Hospital Ortopédico Infantil — the Children’s Orthopedic Hospital. The surgical procedure to reattach the tendons and restore mobility to my hand was eventually completed, and I followed a rehabilitation program documented in medical records from that hospital. But the difficulty of that process — the bureaucratic obstacles, the distances, the costs, the absence of any straightforward path to care — left a lasting impression on me about what it meant to need help in Venezuela and to discover that the systems meant to provide it had largely failed.
That same period was marked by another obstacle that sounds small but reflects something larger about life under that government. In order to leave Venezuela, I needed a valid passport. My United States tourist visa was stamped in an expired passport, and obtaining a new or extended passport from the Venezuelan government was an extraordinarily difficult process at that time. The government was experiencing serious problems issuing travel documents. We ultimately had to use the medical records from my hand injury to petition for an extension of my passport on humanitarian grounds. A formal injury — documented, certified, filed with the government — was the tool we needed to accomplish something as basic as obtaining a travel document. That is the country I left.
III. MY POLITICAL VIEWS AND MY IDENTITY AS SOMEONE FORMED IN THE UNITED STATES
I grew up in a household where opposition to the Chavista government was openly expressed. My father, Brigzen Aroldo Coronado Lobo, opposed the government and said so clearly. That political environment shaped my own understanding of Venezuela’s government and its impact on ordinary people’s lives. As I grew older — both during my last years in Venezuela and throughout my adult life in the United States — I developed my own views, consistent with those of my family: I believe the Venezuelan government has been responsible for the destruction of the country’s institutions, the erosion of basic rights, and the suffering of millions of people.
These views were not something I kept private. Among my friends, my family, and the people who knew me, my opposition to the Chavista government was known and openly expressed. I am prepared to support this with declarations from individuals who knew me and can attest to my political views. My opposition to the Venezuelan government is genuine and has been consistent throughout my adult life.
But I want to explain something about my situation that goes beyond my political opinions. I am not simply a person who disagrees with the Venezuelan government. I am a person who, from the Venezuelan government’s perspective, embodies a specific and suspicious profile. I left Venezuela at fifteen. I lived in the United States throughout my adult years. I held Temporary Protected Status — a form of protection granted by the United States government — for several years. My father is known in Venezuela as a government opponent. My uncle, Rodney Coronado Lobo, had a publicly visible association with government-aligned political organizations in Venezuela and now lives in the United States with his family, which includes United States citizens.
When I try to imagine how Venezuelan authorities would see me if I returned today, I do not think they would see a neutral person. I think they would see a young man who was formed entirely in the United States, who benefited from American immigration protections, whose family has deep roots here, and who comes from a household with a known history of political opposition. In the current political environment in Venezuela — where laws now formally criminalize perceived sympathy with American interests or support for international pressure against the government — that profile alone is enough to generate suspicion, questioning, and risk.
IV. MY TEMPORARY PROTECTED STATUS AND ITS TERMINATION
I obtained Temporary Protected Status (TPS) for Venezuela, which was first granted to me with an effective date of August 8, 2022. My TPS was subsequently renewed, covering me through September 10, 2025. During this period, I was authorized to live and work lawfully in the United States.
On November 7, 2025, the Department of Homeland Security terminated the 2021 Venezuela TPS designation. My TPS terminated on that date. The loss of TPS made the prospect of being forced to return to Venezuela suddenly and concretely real in a way it had not been before. I have lived my entire adult life in this country. I do not know how to live in Venezuela as an adult. I do not know how to navigate its systems, its social dynamics, its political pressures, or its daily dangers as someone who left at fifteen and has not been back since. The termination of TPS made me confront, for the first time with full seriousness, what return would actually mean for me.
V. THE LEGAL AND POLITICAL FRAMEWORK THAT SHAPES MY FEAR
My fear of returning to Venezuela is not based solely on general conditions in the country, though those conditions are severe. It is also grounded in specific legal developments that demonstrate how the Venezuelan government has formalized the persecution of individuals it perceives as connected to American interests or opposed to its authority.
In November 2024, the Venezuelan National Assembly enacted the Ley Orgánica Libertador Simón Bolívar contra el Bloqueo Imperialista y en Defensa de la República Bolivariana de Venezuela (Organic Law Libertador Simón Bolívar against the Imperialist Blockade and in Defense of the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela), published in Official Gazette No. 6,859 Extraordinary on November 29, 2024. This law criminalizes, with prison sentences of twenty-five to thirty years, any conduct the government characterizes as promoting, supporting, or facilitating international sanctions or actions against Venezuela’s sovereignty. The language of the law is broad: it reaches not only direct action but perceived sympathy, indirect support, or conduct the government interprets as favorable to foreign interests. The law also creates a National Registry of suspected individuals, with immediate consequences including asset freezes and prohibitions on entering Venezuela.
On January 3, 2026, the Venezuelan government published Decree No. 5,200 in Official Gazette No. 6,954 Extraordinary, declaring a State of External Commotion across the entire national territory. The decree was issued in the context of events surrounding the capture of Nicolás Maduro on that date, which the government characterized as an armed attack by the United States against Venezuelan territory. Article 5 of the decree ordered the immediate search and capture across all Venezuelan territory of any person involved in the promotion or support of what the government described as a United States armed attack. The scope of that language — promotion and support, not only direct participation — is what concerns me.
I am a Venezuelan who has lived in the United States for more than seven years, who held TPS granted by the United States government, and who comes from a family with documented connections to American life. I did not participate in any action against Venezuela. But under the framework these laws create, what matters is not only what I did — it is what the government concludes about who I am and what my presence in the United States represents. That conclusion, I believe, would not be favorable to me.
VI. WHY RETURNING TO VENEZUELA WOULD BE ESPECIALLY DANGEROUS FOR ME
There is a dimension of my situation that is specific to me and that I want to explain clearly: I do not know Venezuela as an adult. I left at fifteen. I have never worked there, never rented an apartment there, never navigated its bureaucratic systems independently, never had to deal with its police, its checkpoints, its colectivos — the armed pro-government groups that enforce political loyalty through intimidation and violence in communities across the country — or any of the daily realities that a Venezuelan adult learns to manage over years of living there.
That absence of experience is not simply an inconvenience. It is a form of vulnerability. An adult who has lived in Venezuela knows, through experience, what to say and what not to say, how to behave at a checkpoint, what topics to avoid, which neighbors to trust and which to be cautious around, how to present oneself to avoid drawing attention. I do not have that knowledge. I would be returning as someone who looks Venezuelan, carries a Venezuelan passport, but thinks, speaks, and moves through the world like someone formed entirely in the United States. That combination — Venezuelan identity, American formation, years of TPS, family ties to American citizens — is precisely what makes a returning person like me visible and suspicious in the eyes of the Venezuelan government and the groups that operate on its behalf.
I also have no meaningful support network in Venezuela. My father, my mother, and my brother are here. My uncle and aunt are here. My cousin, with whom I am close, is here. The relationships that form the fabric of my daily life — personal, familial, professional — are all in the United States. If I were forced to return to Venezuela, I would be returning alone, to a country I do not know as an adult, without protection, without support, and with a profile that would make me a target.
VII. WHY I CANNOT SEEK PROTECTION IN VENEZUELA
I cannot seek protection from Venezuelan authorities because the Venezuelan government is the source of the threat I fear. Venezuela has no functioning independent judiciary capable of protecting individuals from government persecution. It has no free press that could expose abuses against me. Civil society organizations that once provided some measure of protection have been dismantled, exiled, or silenced.
Relocating within Venezuela would not protect me. The Venezuelan government’s security apparatus — including the SEBIN (Servicio Bolivariano de Inteligencia Nacional, or Bolivarian National Intelligence Service), which functions as the government’s political police and has been associated with arbitrary detention and the suppression of dissent, and the DGCIM (Dirección General de Contrainteligencia Militar, or General Directorate of Military Counterintelligence), the military intelligence body responsible for internal surveillance and political repression — operates throughout the national territory. The colectivos, armed pro-government groups that enforce political loyalty through intimidation and violence at the community level, are present across Venezuela’s cities and towns. There is no safe location within the country for someone with my profile.
VIII. CONCLUSION
I am asking the United States government for protection from being returned to Venezuela. I am twenty-two years old. I have lived in this country since I was fifteen. I completed my education here, built my adult life here, and formed the relationships and values that define who I am here. Venezuela is the country of my birth and my earliest memories, but it is not a country where I could live safely today.
My fear is genuine and it is specific. It is not the fear of someone who simply prefers to live in the United States. It is the fear of someone who, based on who he is, where he has lived, what his family looks like, and what the Venezuelan government has formally established as the basis for persecution, has concrete and well-founded reasons to believe that returning would put his life and freedom at serious risk.
I have been honest in this declaration. I have described my memories, my circumstances, and my fears as accurately as I can. I respectfully ask for the protection I am seeking.
I declare under penalty of perjury under the laws of the United States of America that the foregoing is true and correct to the best of my knowledge and belief.
Executed on: ___________________________
_______________________________________
Alan David Coronado Dávila
Date of Birth: November 16, 2002
Bozeman, Montana