Early within the morning after Donald Trump’s second inauguration, a big and chaotic household of People — six adults, 4 kids, and a 115lb service canine named Luka — spilled out of a aircraft at Amsterdam’s Schiphol Airport and instructed puzzled border guards that they’d come to say asylum.
Some 48 hours later, they had been in a Dutch refugee middle, becoming a member of a rising variety of transgender People looking for refuge in different developed nations for fear of persecution under the Trump administration.
“We really believed that if we didn’t get out earlier than it began… our youngsters had been going to lose not less than one father or mother, if no more,” Jey Poston, a 32-year-old transgender man and paralegal claiming refugee standing within the Netherlands together with his polyamorous blended household, instructed The Impartial.
“Two of us are trans, two of us have bodily disabilities, we’re a multiracial household, all 4 of our youngsters have autism, and we cross all spectrums of sexuality as nicely. So we’re simply form of a rolling ball of targets.”
Poston was considered one of 4 trans People looking for asylum overseas who shared their tales with The Impartial. And they aren’t alone.
The Dutch non-profit LGBT Asylum Help says it’s offering help for greater than 20 trans People by means of the Netherlands’ refugee course of. Canadian immigration lawyer, Yameena Ansari, says she has seen curiosity from American trans purchasers skyrocket since Trump returned to the White Home.
The full variety of American trans individuals who have emigrated is unknown, however polling suggests hundreds of thousands have moved states inside the U.S. resulting from anti-LGBT+ laws since 2022.
“I’m not gonna lie, when the primary few folks got here to me… I used to be like, ‘OK, these individuals are out to lunch a bit of bit.’ There’s no approach that is occurring in America,” Ansari instructed The Impartial. “Then we began fact-checking all the pieces, and we’re like, ‘whoah, that is insane.’”
Below the Trump administration, crackdowns on the trans neighborhood have escalated. Bathroom bans. Healthcare bans. Athletics bans. Bans from the military. A proposed ban on gun ownership. Obligatory misgendering in school. College LGBT+ packages shuttered. LGBT+ non-profits defunded. Blocks on acquiring passports. Baby abuse investigations into dad and mom of trans kids. Makes an attempt to drive trans ladies into male prisons, the place they’re at risk of rape.
In Ansari’s eyes, all of it provides as much as an interlocking system of oppression that would meet Canada’s definition of “persecution.”
Whether or not asylum officers will agree is unclear. Each Canada and the Netherlands regard the U.S. as a secure nation, and so they usually need asylum seekers to point out there was nowhere safer that they might transfer inside their very own nation.
In July, a Canadian choose temporarily blocked deportation of a non-binary American named Angel Jenkel, discovering that situations within the U.S. had modified sufficient that they would possibly have a “cheap concern of persecution” (though the case is complex and entails different components).
“At this time limit, we aren’t advising that People make asylum claims in Canada,” says Jenkel’s lawyer Sarah Mikhail.
However she says that would change if Trump is ready to use the facility of the federal authorities to disrupt LGBT+ life in blue states and cities sufficient that they now not operate as secure havens.
“There are quite a lot of adjustments being floated that I believe may contribute to this threshold being met… it’s being closely mentioned amongst refugee attorneys.”
Hannah Kreager, 22, from Arizona
On April 19, Hannah Kreager and her dad and mom lastly reached the Canadian frontier after a protracted drive from Arizona. Kreager hugged them goodbye, then drove throughout the border.
Kreager had been fearful since earlier than the election, when she began studying Venture 2025 — the ultra-conservative blueprint for a second Trump time period that calls for “transgender ideology” to be outlawed fully.
But when reports began circulating that Trump might invoke martial law on April 20, Kreager’s father instructed her: “I’m getting you out of right here earlier than the twentieth.” (Thus far, it hasn’t occurred.)
The concept that American trans folks may need a declare to asylum got here as a shock to Kreager’s lawyer, Yameena Ansari, who’s queer and vividly remembers residing beneath martial regulation in Pakistan as a toddler.
“Even earlier on this [interview], I felt like I sounded loopy,” she says. “However this isn’t going to be the tip of it… my purchasers are canaries within the coal mine.”
Kreager believes that the hazard is heightened by Trump’s alliance with tech oligarchs. “In Nazi Germany, there weren’t surveillance cameras. There wasn’t facial recognition… these days, your cellphone microphone may very well be recording all the pieces,” she says. “It’s f***ing terrifying.”
For now, she resides in Calgary, Alberta on a brief work allow whereas she awaits her listening to.
“I’d love to be improper,” she says. “I need to be confirmed improper so f***ing badly.”
Jey Poston, 32, from Georgia
Jey Poston flew from Atlanta, Georgia to Amsterdam on January 19, carrying 35lb of printed proof that he felt proved that the U.S. was now not secure for him.
His household is “a bit of bit distinctive,” he says. The nine-person “polycule” (one member has break up since arriving within the Netherlands) is sure by a posh net of romantic and platonic relationships, and by a shared dedication to elevating the group’s kids collectively.
Now, your entire group is in a “bizarre purgatory”, staying in authorities housing in Burgum, a small city round 160 miles from Amsterdam, whereas they attraction their preliminary rejections beneath the “secure nation” coverage.
Dwelling in “deep Maga territory” in northeastern Georgia, Poston was used to violence and harassment, he says. However within the months after the 2024 election, he says these incidents roughly tripled.
In a single week, strangers hammered on his window screaming slurs, pushed him, shoulder-checked him, spat on him, and barred him from a non-gendered single-stall toilet, he claimed.
And after President Trump’s decision to pardon more than 1,500 January 6 rioters, Poston was satisfied that he couldn’t rely on regulation enforcement if organized hate teams determined to focus on his household.
Now, whereas he waits for a call within the Netherlands, Poston is volunteering at a not too long ago shaped refugee help group, Help Me Leave, whereas lastly starting his medical transition. He took his first testosterone shot in April, administered by his husband (a former U.S. Military fight medic).
“He completed up, put the entire thing away, and mentioned: ‘Congratulations, it’s a boy,’” laughs Poston.
Solène Grey, 19, from Texas
When Texas banned all transition healthcare for under-18s in September 2023, it left Solène Grey with an uncommon downside: she nonetheless had a puberty-blocking implant inside her physique.
The implant meant Grey, then 17, may now not produce her personal hormones, however nor may she legally entry the estrogen her physique wanted to mature. The ban additionally prevented the common blood checks and bone scans she wanted to watch her well being.
The ban didn’t are available in isolation. Having began transitioning at 10 years previous, Grey says she was repeatedly bullied and humiliated in school, by each pupils and lecturers, earlier than allegedly being kicked out onto the streets by her dad and mom at age 18.
In her asylum utility within the Netherlands, she wrote that she was refused entry to homeless shelters in her hometown of Dallas as a result of she was trans, and later suspended from work after reporting a colleague’s demise threats to HR.
“I used to be in a spot the place I didn’t even know the that means of security anymore,” Grey tells The Impartial.
Grey mentioned that shifting to a extra LGBT+ pleasant metropolis was not an possibility because of the excessive price of residing in blue states and her lack of {qualifications}, in addition to Trump’s ongoing marketing campaign to deploy federal law enforcement into Democrat-run cities.
She is now residing on a docked boat exterior Rotterdam that homes about 200 asylum seekers, biking two hours to cultural integration lessons whereas she appeals her preliminary denial.
Jane Arc, 47, from California
This March, Jane Arc was crossing the street in San Francisco when a driver began screaming out their window that they had been “going to kill [her]” — and gunned their truck as if to run her over.
Road violence was nothing new. Earlier than 2012, she had a thriving profession as a navy software program contractor, constructing digital weapons for America’s struggle on terror. Then she got here out, was compelled to depart her job, and confronted harassment or bodily assault nearly weekly till she largely stopped going exterior on foot.
Arc was attacked throughout each the Obama and Trump administrations, and the expertise had left her jaded. However Trump’s second time period nonetheless shocked her, with its flurry of govt orders, apparent flouting of the separation of powers, and use of soldiers to suppress protest.
![Jane Arc with her support dog Noah Arc. This March, Arc was crossing the road in San Francisco when a driver started screaming out their window that they were ‘going to kill [her]’](https://static.independent.co.uk/2025/09/17/2/59/Jane-Arc-02-CROPPED.jpg)
“When the federal government is appearing with the navy, and quickly with none form of oversight course of, that has the potential to have a lot of folks killed. I didn’t need to be considered one of them,” she says. “While you’re preventing the federal government, you simply can’t win. And I discovered that working for the federal government.”
As a profitable trans athlete, she additionally felt personally focused by Trump’s orders on sport. She has had cops known as on her in altering rooms earlier than, so she now feared being arrested on the health club, she mentioned. Her top (6ft 3in) makes her particularly susceptible, typically stopping her from mixing in amongst cis folks.
By March, she was struggling fixed, disabling nervousness complications. If all this was occurring even in a metropolis famend as an LGBT+ haven, she thought, how may wherever within the nation be secure?
“There isn’t a motive to depart [a life] as a software program engineer in San Francisco to stay in rural Holland in a small sq. room,” she says. “I don’t need to do that; I’d give something to stay there once more. However I can’t.”
As she waits for a call within the Ter Apel asylum seekers’ middle within the Netherlands, Arc is pessimistic about her probabilities. She says Dutch authorities staff have instructed her they don’t need to “p*** off” the U.S. by branding it an unsafe nation.
She expects to be deported, and when that occurs, she fears that the Trump administration will discover some pretext to imprison her with males.
“I don’t need to be the person who makes the Netherlands resolve it’s not secure for trans folks [in the U.S.], and alter their coverage,” she says. “However I believe that considered one of us must get killed for that to alter.
“Which considered one of us will get to be that particular person?”
