Trans American Who Fled U.S. for Europe Returns After Refugee Center Experience

An American transgender refugee has returned to the United States after spending time at a troubled asylum center in the Netherlands, though her concerns about life back home remain unresolved.

Jane-Michelle Arc, 48, traveled to Ter Apel, the Netherlands’ largest refugee camp, after Donald Trump was re-elected in 2024, saying she feared for her safety as a transgender woman in America.

Arc sought asylum in the European country, but after facing difficult conditions at the camp — where violence, including stabbings and assaults, has been reported — she decided she wanted to go back to her native California.

Now back in the US, Arc has said the move has not erased the worries that pushed her to leave in the first place.

‘The situation I have in the US as a trans person, not good, right? But here, I will be hurt or killed,’ Arc told local outlet Pow News.

‘It is too dangerous to walk to the grocery store because of the people that live in the camp, and I’m one of them, I live here. You see these guys in yellow vests, they actually wear them because there are so many stabbings.’

Ter Apel has also drawn concern from the Red Cross, which has said aid volunteers feel ‘unsafe’ at the site and warned that the level of violence there ‘cannot be controlled.’

Arc returned to the United States last month, but the software engineer has found that rebuilding her life after the ordeal has not been simple.

From the healthcare system to the expensive grocery prices, she’s finding life difficult along the Pacific Coast after a year away. 

‘First time shopping in the US, and In-N-Out too. America is really, really loud and overwhelming. And everything is so expensive,’ she wrote on Threads shortly after returning.

‘The Dutch complain about groceries being expensive, but good grief, San Francisco is a whole different experience.’ 

On Wednesday, she wrote: ‘I have my gripes with the Dutch healthcare system. And I know what I like about the American healthcare system. The ways in which the US system are bad are very, very bad. The ways in which the Dutch system are bad are “bad,” but not the way the US is. 

‘I feel like healthcare is something humanity decided to just make worse on purpose because it seems like we know what we want and need from healthcare as a species.’  

A few weeks ago, she celebrated being back in the US for a week by acknowledging how much more ‘comfortable’ the States are. 

Despite the ease of living more safely, she complained that the ‘transphobia is quite overt.’ 

‘Which is the way it was before I left,’ she wrote. ‘America isn’t supposed to be like this. I wish society gave a s**t.’ 

She also complained about the ongoing debate about transgender athletes in sports, as she is a triathlon athlete herself who has written about competing and winning women’s events. 

‘I’m a trans athlete and I don’t give a s**t who I compete against, I’m there to win,’ she wrote. ‘If that’s men, fine. Women, fine.’  

During Arc’s early days at Ter Apel in April 2025, she candidly wrote on Substack about missing California, saying: ‘I feel California in my bones. So deeply.

‘I need California in a way I struggle to describe because it is so deep and elemental and romantic and passionate and good and true it just stops meaning anything because it means everything. And I left, man, I left California.’ 

She wrote about not having toiletries inside the asylum center and wearing filthy clothing. 

From her bedside on her first night, she wrote about not being afraid in the center. 

‘I am not afraid someone is going to threaten to kill me while screaming slurs at me outside this door. I am not afraid I will be arrested and killed in a men’s jail for peeing in a public restroom. I am not afraid that one group of people is using me as a pawn in a greater ideological war against another group of people,’ she wrote. 

‘I can’t describe the feeling of that stuff not being on my shoulders. It’s been there now for a long time.’ 

In a later post, Arc, who also posts online under the name Max Toegang, wrote: ‘This place is f**king dire, and it has problems. But hate and aggression aren’t the problems.’ 

She also detailed how the center told her to ‘be careful who I hang out with and where I go’ after she got ‘sideways looks from Muslims.’ 

It is unclear when Arc started to feel physically unsafe at the center.  

For years, it has sheltered people fleeing war and persecution, including Eritreans, Somalis and Syrians, who say it remains too dangerous to return home despite the fall of Bashar al-Assad.

Now, a new wave has begun arriving: transgender Americans who say they fled the US fearing for their safety after Donald Trump returned to the White House.

Since May 20, the Central Agency for the Reception of Asylum Seekers (COA) has limited access, allowing only vulnerable asylum seekers, such as women and children, inside.

Others must wait outside until space opens up, and the Red Cross reported the violence in front is due to a ‘small group of men who are generally not among the people seeking assistance.’

The area will become a safety-risk zone, allowing authorities to conduct preventive searches, Dutch Asylum and Migration Minister Van den Brink announced per NL Times.

‘It’s scary, it’s legitimately scary, I decided that my mental health is degrading so substantially being here, that I just need to get out,’ Arc said at the time. 

Arc transitioned from male to female in 2012, and changed the gender on her ID in 2013.

But after Trump’s re-election, she feared losing protections in jobs, housing and healthcare. When her passport renewal threatened to erase her legal identity, she chose to leave the US.

She previously told The Guardian that fleeing the country is ‘the dumbest thing’ she has ever done.

‘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,”‘ she said.

The Daily Mail has reached out to Arc for comment.