A transgender American who fled the US in a huff at President Trump’s reelection has been forced to return home to escape a notorious European asylum center — admitting that leaving was “the dumbest thing I’ve ever done.”
Software engineer Jane-Michelle Arc, 48, returned home to CAlifornia after failing to win asylum in the Netherlands — and discovering life in the notorious Ter Apel refugee camp was far more terrifying than anything under Trump’s America.
Before returning, Arc gave numerous interviews decrying the conditions at the camp — specifically referring to anti-trans hostility from other asylum seekers, most from Syria, Eritrea, Somalia, Turkey, Algeria and Morocco.
“This is the dumbest thing I’ve ever done,” Arc previously admitted to the Guardian of the “Wildly stupid” decision to flee.
“I hear a lot of people saying: ‘You are an idiot. You came here from America.’ People will tell me: ‘Did you think about moving to California?’ And then I say: ‘Well, I lived in San Francisco’ and then they go: ‘Oh, that’s a heaven for gay people,’” Arc admitted,
“The situation I have in the US as a trans person, not good, right? But here, I will be hurt or killed,” Arc separately told Dutch outlet Pow News last month.
The area around the camp, the largest in the Netherlands, was declared a safety risk zone following a series of stabbings and fights, according to a letter from the Dutch government reported by NL Times.
“It is too dangerous to walk to the grocery store because of the people that live in the camp,” Arc previously conceded. “You see these guys in yellow vests, they actually wear them because there are so many stabbings.”
Arc’s social media also marked optimism at a new life dramatically shifting to despair at reality.
“This place is f–king dire,” Arc wrote in one post under the name Max Toegang, recalling in another being told to “be careful who I hang out with and where I go” following “sideways looks from Muslims.”
Arc returned to the US last month — but quickly went back to complaining.
“America is really, really loud and overwhelming. And everything is so expensive,” Arc wrote in a post shortly after returning to the US.
“The Dutch complain about groceries being expensive, but good grief, San Francisco is a whole different experience.”
In a separate post last month, Arc admitted how much more “comfortable” the US is, but still complained that the “transphobia is quite overt.”
Still, the trans exile admitted that before leaving
“I did it because I was afraid for my life. I didn’t do this in secret. I talked to everybody I knew. I said, ‘I am planning to do this wildly stupid thing,’” Arc previously told the Guardian.
“Everybody said, ‘I don’t love this for you, but there is no other option,’” Arc added.
While the estimated number of transgender individuals who have left the US to claim asylum since Trump’s reelection isn’t known, hundreds of thousands claim to want to move to friendly states.
Nearly half of transgender adults in the US have relocated or are planning to relocate to another state, according to a May 2025 report by the Williams Institute at UCLA School of Law.
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