‘Trans refugee’ who fled US for migrant camp: ‘This is the dumbest thing I’ve ever done’

A trans-identifying man was horrified by the dangerous conditions of a refugee camp in the Netherlands and has since returned to Trump's America. The wave of garment-rending and teeth-gnashing that greeted the 2024 election of Donald J. Trump was not quite as hysterical as the first go-around back in 2016, but there were notable exceptions. A month after the inauguration, the Lemkin Institute for Genocide Prevention, a U.S. NGO committed to identifying and preventing genocide and mass atrocities, announced that Trump’s executive orders pushing back against gender ideology were part of a “genocidal process” that would “effectively destroy … trans people as a group.”

This promptly triggered a wave of “trans refugees” fleeing the fictitious genocide. In July 2025, a Canadian judge halted the deportation of a person identifying as “non-binary” due to Trump’s transgender policies, and the CBC reported that “advocates say (the) ruling could set an ‘important precedent’ for 2SLGBTQ+ immigrants and refugees.” Activists asked Canada’s immigration minister to permit LGBT Americans to claim asylum. 

Dozens of “trans refugees” turned up in the Netherlands, too. Veronica Clifford Carlos, a 28-year-old artist from San Francisco, launched a legal challenge after the Netherlands rejected his application for political asylum following his departure from the U.S. with his father. Carlos claimed that Trump’s America has become a hellscape. LGBT activists must be granted this: They do, in fact, believe their own propaganda. 

It didn’t take some “trans refugees” long to begin having second thoughts. Forty-eight-year-old Jane-Michelle Arc, a software engineer who fled California (California!) returned home after spending some time in “the notorious Ter Apel refugee camp.” According to the New York Post: “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.”

Arc ended up in the refugee camp after fleeing to the Netherlands and was horrified by the conditions he discovered there. The other asylum seekers — from Syria, Eritrea, Somalia, Turkey, Algeria, and Morocco — were not pleased to be stuck in a camp with a trans-identifying American, and their transphobia was far less hypothetical than Trump’s alleged genocide. Arc began speaking to Dutch TV outlets, begging for help (presumably to gales of laughter from the Dutch public upon discovering that an LGBT activist from San Francisco was in Ter Apel refugee camp).

“This is the dumbest thing I’ve ever done,” Arc ended up admitting to the Guardian. “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 heaven for gay people’ … 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.’ Everybody said, ‘I don’t love this for you, but there is no other option.’”

One suspects that Arc’s friends, who told him he had “no other option” but to flee San Francisco for a refugee camp in the Netherlands, perhaps did not like him very much. 

Arc is not alone, although most are not planning to move quite as far. 

“While the estimated number of transgender individuals who have left the U.S. to claim asylum since Trump’s reelection isn’t known, hundreds of thousands claim to want to move to friendly states,” the New York Post reported. “Nearly half of transgender adults in the U.S. 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.”

Meanwhile, Arc noted that conditions in the camp were dire. 

“It is too dangerous to walk to the grocery store because of the people that live in the camp. You see these guys in yellow vests; they actually wear them because there are so many stabbings.” 

He noted that he got a lot of “sideways looks from Muslims” but did not say what he thought about Trump’s previous “Muslim ban” policy.

Upon returning to the United States in July, however, Arc promptly resumed his whining. Although he confessed to being more “comfortable,” he noted that the “transphobia is quite overt” and that groceries were excruciatingly expensive in San Francisco. 

But as he previously told one outlet: “The situation I have in the U.S. as a trans person is not good, right? But (in the refugee camp), I will be hurt or killed.”

Perhaps the Lemkin Institute for Genocide Prevention should be sent to the Netherlands to see what the Muslim migrants are up to. Arc could tell them where to start.