A 48-year-old transgender software engineer from San Francisco who fled the United States after Donald Trump's reelection in 2024 has returned home, saying that leaving was the dumbest thing she had ever done. Jane-Michelle Arc spent months at the Ter Apel refugee camp in the Netherlands seeking asylum, only to come back to California last month after her claim was denied and conditions at the camp turned dangerous.
Arc said she fled the country because she was afraid for her life, according to an interview with the New York Post. She told everyone she knew about her plan to leave before departing for the Netherlands, per that same interview, and once there she was told there was no other option for her. Instead of safety, she said she found a camp so unstable that she feared being hurt or killed while staying there.
Ter Apel hosts asylum seekers from countries including Syria, Eritrea, Somalia, Turkey, Algeria and Morocco, and Arc reported facing anti-transgender hostility from some of her fellow residents there. She said it became too dangerous to even walk to the grocery store because of people living at the camp, and in a social media post she described the camp bluntly as dire.
A Legal Wall Built Into Dutch Asylum Law
Arc's case ran into a legal reality that has doomed nearly every American asylum claim in the Netherlands: the Dutch Immigration and Naturalization Service classifies the United States as a safe country of origin, which forces applicants through an expedited process where claims are presumed unfounded unless they can prove imminent, individualized harm, according to DutchNews.nl. That legal standard was reinforced in November 2025, when an Amsterdam court upheld the government's rejection of another transgender San Franciscan's asylum claim, ruling that even though U.S. conditions for transgender people had worsened, applicants still did not face a systematic denial of legal protection or essential services, as reported by Jurist.org.
Arc was not alone in making the trip. Official Dutch immigration data showed 76 U.S. citizens claimed asylum in the Netherlands in 2025, a sharp jump from just nine applicants the year before and far above the historical average of nine to eighteen per year, driven largely by transgender Americans seeking refuge after the 2024 election, per a Guardian report cited in the dossier. Veronica Clifford-Carlos, a 28-year-old transgender artist and actor also from San Francisco, arrived at Amsterdam's Schiphol Airport in June 2025 to request asylum after enduring street harassment and death threats, and was later placed in refugee housing in Heerlen while appealing her own denial, according to The Public's Radio.
Danger Inside the Camp Itself
The conditions Arc described were not unique to her account. In July, Dutch Asylum and Migration Minister Van den Brink declared the area surrounding Ter Apel a designated safety risk zone, granting police preventive search powers following stabbings and violent altercations in and around the facility, per NL Times. That designation echoed a January 2025 report from the Dutch Inspectorate of Justice and Security, which found safety conditions at Ter Apel poor and exposed residents to unacceptable risks of violence, noting that weapon confiscations at the site had tripled in prior months, according to the European Council on Refugees and Exiles.
Back home, Arc offered a blunter comparison than legal rulings or inspection reports: she described the United States as more comfortable than Europe, even while complaining that America was loud, overwhelming and expensive. She said San Francisco groceries were pricier than what she paid in the Netherlands, and she acknowledged that transphobia in the United States was quite overt. Still, weighed against life at Ter Apel, she said returning was the clear choice — even after calling the entire attempt the dumbest thing she had ever done.
Part of a Broader Pattern of Trans Relocation
Arc's journey, and reversal, fits into a wider pattern researchers have already documented. A May 2025 survey by the Williams Institute at UCLA School of Law found that 48% of transgender U.S. adults surveyed in late 2024 had moved or were considering moving to a more affirming location within the country, while 45% said they wanted to leave the U.S. entirely. Shortly after taking office in January 2025, Trump signed executive orders establishing a federal definition of biological sex as strictly male or female and directing measures to curb gender-affirming medical care for minors under 19, actions that were frequently cited in asylum filings by transgender Americans, per The Public's Radio.
The Dutch Ministry of Foreign Affairs updated its own travel advice for the United States in 2025, warning LGBTQ+ travelers that several U.S. states had enacted laws that could negatively affect their access to healthcare and civil protections. It is a formal acknowledgment from a European government of the legal patchwork transgender Americans now navigate — even as that same government's asylum system treats the country, on paper, as uniformly safe.
Exactly how many transgender Americans have left the country to seek asylum abroad remains unknown. What is documented is the gap between the hope that drove people like Arc and Clifford-Carlos to Dutch airports and camps, and the legal and physical realities that met them there — a gap Arc now describes from the other side, back in the city she once fled.
