A 48-year-old transgender Californian who claimed asylum in the Netherlands after Trump's re-election spent a year in a violent refugee camp, came home, and is now complaining about grocery prices and American healthcare.

Jane-Michelle Arc, a software engineer and triathlon athlete, left the United States in 2024, declaring she feared for her life as a transgender woman under a second Trump administration. She ended up at Ter Apel, the Netherlands' largest refugee processing center, a facility so dangerous that the Red Cross has said violence there "cannot be controlled." Last month, Arc returned to the San Francisco area. She has spent her first weeks back posting grievances on social media about how loud, expensive, and transphobic America is.

The arc of the story, flee the country, land in a place far worse, come crawling back, then resume complaining, speaks for itself. But the details make the point sharper.

Arc traded San Francisco for stabbings and yellow safety vests

Arc transitioned from male to female in 2012 and changed the gender on her ID in 2013. After Trump won re-election, she said she feared losing protections in employment, housing, and healthcare. She also claimed she was unable to renew her passport as a woman, though the specific policy or agency responsible for that is not identified in available reporting.

She told the Daily Mail and other outlets that she chose to seek asylum in the Netherlands, settling at Ter Apel, a sprawling camp in the northeastern part of the country that has housed people fleeing wars in Eritrea, Somalia, and Syria. A new wave of transgender Americans has also arrived at the facility since Trump returned to the White House.

On her first night, Arc struck a triumphant tone on her Substack, writing under the name Max Toegang:

"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."

That sense of relief did not last. Ter Apel is not a progressive sanctuary. It is a processing center plagued by violence. The Red Cross has reported that aid volunteers feel "unsafe" at the site. The agency also noted that violence outside the facility comes from a "small group of men who are generally not among the people seeking assistance."

Arc herself described the danger in an interview with Pow News, a Dutch outlet:

"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."

She also told Pow News that her situation in the U.S. as a trans person was "not good," but that at Ter Apel, "I will be hurt or killed." The contrast between her early Substack posts, where she wrote that "hate and aggression aren't the problems", and her later statements about fearing for her life is stark. When exactly her sense of safety changed, and what triggered the shift, remains unclear.

Dutch officials declared the camp a safety-risk zone

Conditions at Ter Apel deteriorated to the point that the Dutch government intervened. Since May 20, the Central Agency for the Reception of Asylum Seekers, the Dutch government body that manages the facility, restricted access to only vulnerable asylum seekers, defined as women and children. Everyone else must wait outside until space opens.

Dutch Asylum and Migration Minister Van den Brink went further, announcing that the area around Ter Apel would become a designated safety-risk zone, giving authorities the power to conduct preventive searches. That is not the kind of measure a government takes at a facility where things are going well.

The situation at Ter Apel is a reminder that the immigration challenges facing Western nations are not limited to the United States. Across Europe, governments are grappling with overcrowded facilities and the security problems that follow. The legal battles over transgender policies in the U.S. have generated enormous political heat, but Arc's experience suggests that the countries progressives hold up as models face their own serious problems, ones that don't get nearly as much attention.

Arc also detailed receiving a warning from the center itself. Staff told her to "be careful who I hang out with and where I go" after she received what she described as "sideways looks from Muslims." In a later Substack post, she acknowledged the grim reality of the place she had chosen: "This place is f***ing dire, and it has problems."

She called fleeing 'the dumbest thing' she ever did, then came home and kept complaining

Arc eventually decided to leave. She told The Guardian that fleeing the U.S. was "the dumbest thing" she had ever done, a remarkable admission from someone who had framed her departure as a matter of survival.

In that same Guardian interview, she described her reasoning for leaving in the first place:

"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.'"

There was, of course, another option: stay in California, one of the most progressive states in the country, where transgender protections are among the strongest in the nation. But Arc chose a Dutch refugee camp instead. And when the camp turned out to be violent and miserable, she came home.

Her return to California has not brought contentment. Shortly after arriving, she posted on Threads: "First time shopping in the US, and In-N-Out too. 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."

San Francisco's cost of living is a legitimate gripe, but it is a strange complaint from someone who just spent a year in a camp where she feared being stabbed on the way to buy food. The broader pattern of public figures complaining about the very systems they benefit from is familiar enough by now.

Back in America, Arc finds new grievances

After about a week back in the States, Arc posted on Threads acknowledging she was more "comfortable" in the U.S. than she had been at Ter Apel. But she followed that with a complaint that "transphobia is quite overt", adding, "Which is the way it was before I left. America isn't supposed to be like this. I wish society gave a s***."

She also weighed in on healthcare, writing that while the Dutch system has its flaws, "the ways in which the US system are bad are very, very bad." She concluded: "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."

And on the subject of athletics, Arc, who competes in triathlons, posted: "I'm a trans athlete and I don't give a s*** who I compete against, I'm there to win. If that's men, fine. Women, fine." The question of fairness in women's sports continues to be contested at every level, from cases pending before the Supreme Court to state legislatures across the country.

Even in April 2025, while still at Ter Apel, Arc's Substack posts revealed the tension at the center of her story. She wrote about California with unmistakable longing:

"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 left California because she said America under Trump was too dangerous. She ended up in a camp where the Red Cross couldn't guarantee safety and the Dutch government had to authorize warrantless searches. Then she came back to California, and started complaining about grocery prices.

Several open questions remain. The current legal status of Arc's asylum claim in the Netherlands is unknown. The specific U.S. passport policy she says prevented her from renewing her documents as a woman has not been identified in reporting. And the scale of the supposed wave of transgender Americans arriving at Ter Apel, whether it amounts to a handful of people or something larger, is not documented with any numbers. The political debates over Trump-era policy shifts will continue to generate these kinds of stories, but the facts beneath the drama deserve scrutiny.

Arc's year-long detour through a violent Dutch refugee camp did not prove that America is unsafe for transgender people. It proved the opposite. She left the freest country on earth, discovered that the alternative was worse by every measure she cared about, and came home to the place that was supposedly trying to erase her, where she promptly resumed the luxury of public complaint.