The Finnish Immigration Service (Migri) has denied asylum to a Venezuelan couple on the grounds that they are not prominent political figures and their participation in past protests is no longer relevant.
However, if returned to Venezuela, Deylin Anzola and Luis Zapata have revealed to Yle News that they could face prison terms of up to 20 years under a series of new laws introduced over the past two years that have further tightened government control over civil society and political opposition.
Anzola and Zapata left Venezuela for Peru in 2018 because of the political climate in their home country and the suppression of any form of protest. However, life for Venezuelans in Peru has become increasingly challenging in recent years due to economic hardships, restrictive integration policies and increasing levels of anti-Venezuelan sentiment.
In 2025, they applied for asylum in Finland.
"We were looking for somewhere to feel safe," Anzola explains. "We wanted to live in a place where we could trust the government and the police. We didn't have that back in our country."
In January 2026 however, Migri rejected their application. They now face the prospect of being deported back to Venezuela at a time of huge political and social upheaval in the South American country.
How much has changed in Venezuela?
Although Venezuela's erstwhile President Nicolás Maduro was removed from the country by US special forces earlier this year and brought to New York to face drug trafficking charges, his regime remains very much in power.
Maduro had ruled Venezuela by decree since 2015, quashing public opposition and silencing or imprisoning critics. He secured a third term in office in 2024, despite international observers widely reporting that he had lost the vote.
After Maduro's detention by US forces on 3 January, the ousted president's deputy, Delcy Rodríguez, was sworn in as his replacement.
However, as human rights organisation Amnesty International pointed out in a report published last week, evidence of widespread repression, including "arbitrary detentions, enforced disappearances and extrajudicial executions" by the Maduro regime have been well-documented over the past decade.
"The state machinery responsible for those crimes is still firmly in place, now supported by the US authorities’ involvement," Amnesty International Secretary General Agnès Callamard stated.
This spells trouble for any Venezuelan citizen who has ever dared to criticise the regime, whether headed by Maduro or Rodríguez.
"Just by talking freely like this, we will probably be now considered an enemy of the Venezuelan state, because this is what they hate the most, that people want to tell the truth," Zapata says.
In the video below, Luis Zapata outlines why he and his girlfriend Deylin Anzola fear for their safety and liberty if they are deported to Venezuela.
Government crackdown on "hate crimes"
Despite Maduro's removal from power last month, reports from inside the country indicate that very little has yet changed for the people of Venezuela.
The highly-publicised release of hundreds of political prisoners by the Venezuelan government in recent weeks, for example, has been dismissed by critics of the regime as a ploy to appease Trump.
In an interview with the BBC, Ramón Guanipa, the son of opposition leader Juan Pablo Guanipa, warned Trump "not [to] be fooled" by the government's tactics, adding that if Trump "thinks this is going alright, it is not".
Against this backdrop, Deylin Anzola says that a culture of fear and distrust of authorities still hangs over the country, and this makes her fearful of what will happen to her if she is forcefully returned to Venezuela.
"I participated in protests in 2017 because I was against the government and all these things that were happening," Anzola explains, adding that she also posted "memes and that kind of content" on her Facebook and Instagram accounts following the widely disputed election result of 2024.
"After that, the government published a law that said if you share that kind of thing you are against the government. They said it's a hate crime," she says.
The punishments for such actions could be up to 20 years in prison, Anzola adds.
Zapata meanwhile points out that aside from political statements, merely complaining about a lack of basic necessities in Venezuela could be considered seditious under the terms of the government's draconian laws.
He cites as an example the water that flows into his mother's home.
"It's brown. You cannot cook with it. You cannot clean with it. You cannot do your laundry," he says.
Yet complaining about the quality of the water could potentially land someone in prison, due to the regime's new laws.
"That's treason [to complain]. How can that be treason?" Zapata asks. "But this is the reality of life for people in Venezuela. They have to keep their mouths shut."
"Life there is impossible"
The concerns Anzola and Zapata carry about the consequences and hardships they might face in Venezuela are well-founded.
Yle's veteran foreign correspondent Pertti Pesonen has covered events in Venezuela extensively over the past two decades, including the production of a documentary in 2018 that was censored by the Venezuelan government.
He tells Yle News that not much has changed in the years since.
"There are about nine million Venezuelans who have left Venezuela, and they leave it for a reason, in most cases because life there is impossible," he says, adding that as "there's no rule of law in Venezuela", people can be arrested and detained for spurious reasons.
Finnish diplomat Eija Rotinen agrees with Pesonen's assessment that the situation in Venezuela is uncertain and unpredictable.
Rotinen has served as Finland's ambassador to Colombia since late last year, and should also be the Finnish head of mission in Venezuela. However, her attempts to receive accreditation from the Venezuelan government have been complicated by the disputed nature of the 2024 election results.
Rotinen has not been able to visit Venezuela since beginning her post in Bogotá last September, but she has heard from the Finnish consulates about conditions inside the country since Maduro's removal from office.
"I also hear that it's a totalitarian system, so it's not dependent on one person at all, it's the whole machinery with the Collectivos [pro-government paramilitary groups] and the military, and so the Venezuelan people themselves have been quite careful about expressing any joy for the departure of Maduro, because so many others are still there," she explained.
In her view, Finland should "wait and see" how the situation in Venezuela develops before making any decision about deporting people back to the country.
"My view is that it's not necessarily a safe country to return," she says. "It might be one day, but at the moment I would dare say that things haven't changed that much."
Pesonen meanwhile added that, given his knowledge of the country's judicial system and its close ties with the regime, he would not recommend that Finland deport a Venezuelan citizen back to the country.
"I think the rule is that the country has to be considered safe in order to deport somebody, and Venezuela definitely is not a country that can be considered safe with 100 percent certainty," he says.
Asylum rejected
Yet this is exactly what Migri plans to do.
In the decision handed down by Migri to Anzola and Zapata, as seen by Yle News, the agency notes that the couple are afraid they would be imprisoned for anti-government activities if they were returned to Venezuela.
Migri's document also states that the couple have given consistent and honest accounts of the events they have participated in and their fears of the consequences.
However, their application for asylum was rejected.
Migri's Special Senior Administrative Officer Teija Savolainen acknowledged in an email to Yle News that the "social, political, and humanitarian situation in Venezuela is difficult" but noted that there is no ongoing war or internal armed conflict.
Each application is handled on an individual, or case-by-case, basis, she added.
"The security situation in Venezuela is not considered to be so serious that those returning to Venezuela would be in real danger of being subjected to the death penalty, torture, persecution or other treatment that violates human dignity," Savolainen wrote.
However, she also revealed that Migri does "not have country-specific instructions for processing applications from Venezuelan citizens", but instead relies on its own guidelines for application of law when deciding on such cases.
"We're trying to make them [Migri] understand that no one is actually safe in Venezuela," Zapata says.
Migri's refusal of Anzola and Zapata's asylum also comes despite the fact that Venezuelans have been added to Finland's list of quota refugees for 2026, which seeks to offer protection to particularly vulnerable groups of people as decreed by the UNHCR.
The list specifies that Finland will offer 50 asylum places to Venezuelans who have resided in Peru, as Anzola and Zapata did before applying for protection from Finnish authorities.
Finland also advised its citizens in December to avoid all travel to Venezuela due to the deteriorating security situation in the country.
A future filled with uncertainty
Anzola and Zapata have appealed Migri's decision, and they now live in hope that the Finnish authorities will change their minds.
For now, they are trying to further integrate into Finland, a country they had hoped would be their new home — by learning Finnish and adapting to Finnish culture.
"We're trying to learn Finnish as much as we can, because we want to find a job and we know it is really important to speak Finnish," Anzola says.
In the video below, Deylin Anzola and Luis Zapata explain how they felt about Migri rejecting their applications for asylum.
However, the prospect of being deported back to Venezuela hangs over them the entire time. They are sceptical about the regime's claims that life in Venezuela is changing.
"These people have been lying to us all our lives," Zapata says.
Correction, 13 January, 10.46am: Removed reference to Trump 'installing' Rodríguez as Maduro's replacement.
