A 48-year-old transgender software engineer who fled San Francisco for a Dutch refugee camp after President Trump's reelection has returned to California, conceding the move was a catastrophic mistake.
Jane-Michelle Arc left the United States sometime after the 2024 election, applied for asylum in the Netherlands, and ended up at Ter Apel, the largest refugee camp in the country. She failed to win asylum. And the conditions she encountered at the camp made her previous life in one of America's most progressive cities look like a paradise by comparison.
Arc, who worked as a software engineer, told The Guardian in a January interview that she knew exactly how the decision would sound to most people:
"This is the dumbest thing I've ever done."
She said she fled because she "was afraid for my life" as a trans woman following Trump's reelection. But the asylum bid collapsed, and Arc returned to California last month, trading a camp surrounded by stabbings and government safety warnings for the country she had insisted was too dangerous to stay in.
The Ter Apel camp houses asylum seekers primarily from Syria, Eritrea, Somalia, Turkey, Algeria, and Morocco. The Dutch government declared the area around the facility a safety risk zone after a series of stabbings and fights, a move reported by NL Times.
Arc described the conditions in blunt terms. In a social media post under the name "Max Toegang," she wrote that the camp was "f***ing dire." She said it was "too dangerous to walk to the grocery store because of the people that live in the camp."
She recalled receiving warnings to "be careful who I hang out with and where I go" after getting what she described as "sideways looks from Muslims." In an appearance on Dutch outlet Pow News, Arc laid out the grim irony of her situation:
"The situation I have in the US as a trans person, not good, right? But here, I will be hurt or killed."
Arc pointed to the camp's staff as evidence of how routine the violence had become. "You see these guys in yellow vests, they actually wear them because there are so many stabbings," she said.
What makes Arc's story notable is not just the outcome but the fact that she anticipated it. She told The Guardian she had warned everyone around her 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.'"
The response from her circle, as she described it, was resigned acceptance rather than encouragement. "Everybody said, 'I don't love this for you, but there is no other option,'" Arc recalled.
But there was another option, and it was the one she had already chosen. Arc lived in San Francisco, a city so well-known for its progressive culture that even other asylum seekers at Ter Apel questioned her judgment. She recounted the exchange 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 a heaven for gay people.'"
Refugees from war-torn countries, people with no American passport, no software engineering career, and no San Francisco apartment to fall back on, could see what Arc could not.
Arc returned to the United States last month. The adjustment has not been smooth, though the complaints have shifted. In a social media post shortly after landing, she wrote: "America is really, really loud and overwhelming. And everything is so expensive."
She added: "The Dutch complain about groceries being expensive, but good grief, San Francisco is a whole different experience."
In a separate post, Arc acknowledged how much more "comfortable" the US is compared to the Dutch refugee camp, but still complained that "transphobia is quite overt." She did not describe any specific incidents of hostility directed at her since returning to California.
Arc's case is unusual. The number of transgender Americans who have actually left the country to claim asylum elsewhere since Trump's reelection is unknown. But a May 2025 report from the Williams Institute at UCLA School of Law found that nearly half of transgender adults in the US have relocated or are planning to relocate to another state, not another country.
That distinction matters. Moving from a red state to a blue one is a domestic choice with practical tradeoffs. Applying for asylum in a foreign country, as a citizen of the wealthiest nation on earth, holding a US passport, with a professional career and a home in San Francisco, is something else entirely. Arc's asylum claim failed. The specific legal basis for the denial has not been reported, but the outcome was not surprising. The Netherlands does not typically grant asylum to citizens of stable Western democracies.
Arc's story is a case study in what happens when political anxiety overrides common sense. She left a country where she had legal protections, a career, and a home in one of the most LGBT-friendly cities on the planet. She traded it for a refugee camp that the Dutch government itself had flagged as a safety risk zone, a facility filled with people who had fled genuine persecution, war, and poverty, and who looked at Arc's American passport with disbelief.
She told everyone it was a bad idea before she left. They agreed. She did it anyway. And when the reality of life in a European asylum center proved worse than the political fears that drove her out of San Francisco, she came home.
The fact that Arc can return to California whenever she wants, and did, is the clearest proof that the danger she cited was never what she made it out to be. Real refugees do not get to change their minds and fly home.
