A 48-year-old transgender American who sought asylum in the Netherlands after Trump's re-election spent roughly a year in a refugee camp so dangerous the Red Cross called it unsafe, then came back to California and started griping about grocery prices.
Jane-Michelle Arc, a software engineer and triathlon athlete from California, returned to the United States last month after her stay at Ter Apel, the Netherlands' largest refugee camp, left her fearing for her physical safety and watching her mental health deteriorate. She had fled the country after the 2024 election, claiming she was "afraid for my life" as a transgender person in America. She landed in a facility where stabbings were so frequent that residents wore yellow safety vests, and the Dutch government eventually declared the surrounding area a safety-risk zone.
Now back in San Francisco, Arc has not exactly settled into quiet gratitude. She has used her Threads and Substack accounts to complain about American grocery prices, the U.S. healthcare system, and what she describes as "overt" transphobia, conditions she says are unchanged from before she left.
Arc transitioned from male to female in 2012 and changed the gender on her ID a year later. After Trump won re-election in 2024, she said she feared losing protections in employment, housing, and healthcare. She also claimed she was unable to renew her passport as a woman, a situation she said threatened to erase her legal identity.
She told The Guardian in a previous interview that she knew the plan was reckless before she carried it out:
"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.'"
She added that everyone she consulted gave the same reluctant blessing: "I don't love this for you, but there is no other option." Arc herself later called fleeing the country "the dumbest thing" she had ever done.
By April 2025, Arc was writing on Substack under the alias Max Toegang about her early days at Ter Apel. Her first-night post was full of relief. She wrote that she was "not afraid someone is going to threaten to kill me while screaming slurs at me outside this door" and "not afraid I will be arrested and killed in a men's jail for peeing in a public restroom."
That relief did not last.
Ter Apel is not a quiet dormitory for displaced families. The Red Cross has deemed the camp dangerous, stating that its own aid volunteers feel "unsafe" at the site and that violence there "cannot be controlled." The organization attributed the violence outside the center to "a small group of men who are generally not among the people seeking assistance."
Arc described the conditions to Dutch outlet Pow News in blunt terms:
"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 told the same outlet that her situation in the U.S. as a transgender person was "not good," but that at Ter Apel, "I will be hurt or killed." Even in a later Substack post, Arc acknowledged the camp's grim reality while insisting the problems were different from what she had feared in America: "This place is f***ing dire, and it has problems. But hate and aggression aren't the problems."
The Dutch government responded to the deteriorating conditions. The Central Agency for the Reception of Asylum Seekers, known as COA, limited access to Ter Apel starting May 20, allowing only vulnerable asylum seekers such as women and children inside. Others had to wait outside until space opened up. Dutch Asylum and Migration Minister Van den Brink announced the area around the camp would become a safety-risk zone, giving authorities the power to conduct preventive searches.
Arc eventually decided to leave. She said her mental health had degraded to the breaking point: "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 returned to California last month. Within days, she was posting on Threads about her re-entry into American life. Her first shopping trip produced this observation: "First time shopping in the US, and In-N-Out too. America is really, really loud and overwhelming. And everything is so expensive."
She followed up with a comparison: "The Dutch complain about groceries being expensive, but good grief, San Francisco is a whole different experience." San Francisco's cost of living is among the highest in the nation, a fact that predates any presidential administration.
A few weeks after returning, Arc posted that she had noticed "overt" transphobia, which, she conceded, was "the way it was before I left." She added: "America isn't supposed to be like this. I wish society gave a s***."
On healthcare, Arc posted a comparison of the Dutch and American systems that managed to criticize both while landing harder on the U.S.: "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." She went further, writing that "healthcare is something humanity decided to just make worse on purpose."
Arc's own words trace a circle that ends exactly where it began. In April 2025, writing from inside Ter Apel, she pined for home: "I feel California in my bones. So deeply." She described the pull in sweeping terms: "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 got California back. And within weeks, she was posting complaints about its prices, its healthcare, and its people.
Arc also weighed in on transgender athletes in competition, writing on Threads: "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." Arc has competed in triathlons and, by her own account, won women's events.
Several open questions remain. It is unclear whether Arc's asylum claim in the Netherlands was formally denied, withdrawn, or is still pending. The specific passport renewal policy she cited as a reason for leaving the U.S. has not been detailed in her public statements. And while reports have referenced "a new wave" of transgender Americans arriving at Ter Apel, no specific numbers have been provided to support that characterization.
Arc fled the freest country on earth for a refugee camp overrun with violence, discovered it was exactly as dangerous as anyone could have predicted, came home, and resumed complaining about the place she just admitted she cannot live without. Some lessons have to be learned the hard way, and some, apparently, do not get learned at all.
