In the early hours following Donald Trump’s second inauguration, a scene unfolded at Amsterdam’s Schiphol Airport that would have seemed unthinkable just a few years ago. Six adults, four children, and a 115-pound service dog named Luka spilled out of a transatlantic flight, weary and anxious, declaring to Dutch border officials that they were seeking asylum. This family, led by 32-year-old transgender man Jey Poston, wasn’t alone. They were joining a steadily growing group of transgender Americans who, fearing persecution back home, are seeking refuge in countries like the Netherlands and Canada.
According to The Independent, Poston’s family—described by him as a “rolling ball of targets”—is polyamorous, multiracial, and includes two trans adults, two with physical disabilities, and four autistic children. “We truly believed that if we did not get out before it started... our children were going to lose at least one parent, if not more,” Poston told The Independent. Their story is emblematic of a broader exodus. Since 2022, polling suggests hundreds of thousands of American transgender people have moved states within the U.S. in response to a wave of anti-LGBT+ laws, and a growing number are now looking to leave the country entirely.
The Dutch non-profit LGBT Asylum Support reports it is currently assisting more than 20 transgender Americans navigating the Netherlands’ refugee process. Meanwhile, Canadian immigration lawyer Yameena Ansari has seen a surge in inquiries from American trans clients since Trump’s return to the White House. “I’m not gonna lie, when the first few people came to me... I was like, ‘OK, these people are out to lunch a little bit.’ There’s no way this is happening in America,” Ansari told The Independent. “Then we started fact-checking everything, and we’re like, ‘Woah, this is insane.’”
The list of crackdowns under the Trump administration reads like a litany: bathroom bans, healthcare bans, athletics bans, military bans, a proposed ban on gun ownership, compulsory misgendering at school, shuttering of university LGBT+ programs, defunding of LGBT+ non-profits, blocks on obtaining passports, child abuse investigations into parents of trans children, and attempts to force trans women into male prisons. According to Ansari, these measures form a system of oppression that could meet Canada’s legal definition of “persecution”—though whether asylum officials will agree remains to be seen.
Both Canada and the Netherlands officially regard the U.S. as a “safe country,” meaning asylum seekers must demonstrate that there was nowhere safer they could have relocated within their own borders. However, this stance is starting to show cracks. In July 2025, a Canadian judge temporarily blocked the deportation of a non-binary American, Angel Jenkel, finding that conditions in the U.S. had shifted enough to create a “reasonable fear of persecution.” Jenkel’s lawyer, Sarah Mikhail, told The Independent that while they aren’t currently advising Americans to make asylum claims in Canada, that could change if Trump’s administration manages to disrupt LGBT+ life in traditionally liberal states and cities.
Hannah Kreager, 22, from Arizona, is one of those who decided not to wait. On April 19, 2025, she and her parents drove to the Canadian border. Kreager hugged her family goodbye and crossed into Canada alone, propelled by fears stoked by the ultra-conservative Project 2025 plan and rumors that Trump might invoke martial law the next day. “I’m getting you out of here before the 20th,” Kreager’s father told her. (Martial law, as it turned out, was not declared.) Kreager is now living in Calgary, Alberta, on a temporary work permit while she awaits her asylum hearing. “I would love to be wrong,” she says. “I want to be proven wrong so fing badly.”
For Kreager’s lawyer, Yameena Ansari, the notion that Americans might have a legitimate claim to asylum was initially hard to believe. “Even earlier in this [interview], I felt like I sounded crazy,” Ansari said. “But this is not going to be the end of it… my clients are canaries in the coal mine.” Kreager herself worries that the danger is amplified by Trump’s ties to tech oligarchs. “In Nazi Germany, there weren’t surveillance cameras. There wasn’t facial recognition... nowadays, your phone microphone could be recording everything,” she told The Independent. “It’s fing terrifying.”
Back in the Netherlands, Jey Poston’s family—having arrived with 35 pounds of printed evidence to support their claim—now lives in government housing in the small town of Burgum, about 160 miles from Amsterdam. They find themselves in “weird purgatory,” appealing their initial rejection under the “safe country” rule. Poston recounted that, after the 2024 election, harassment and violence in their home region of northeastern Georgia “roughly tripled.” In one week alone, he said, strangers hammered on his window screaming slurs, pushed him, spat on him, and even barred him from a non-gendered single-stall bathroom. The decision by President Trump to pardon more than 1,500 January 6 rioters convinced Poston that he could no longer rely on law enforcement for protection if hate groups targeted his family.
Now, as he waits for a decision, Poston volunteers with Help Me Leave, a refugee support group, and has finally begun his medical transition—taking his first testosterone shot in April, administered by his husband, a former U.S. Army combat medic. “He finished up, put the whole thing away, and said: ‘Congratulations, it’s a boy,’” Poston recalled, laughing.
Other stories echo the same themes of fear, displacement, and bureaucratic uncertainty. Solène Gray, 19, from Texas, was left in medical limbo when the state banned all transition healthcare for minors in September 2023. She was stuck with a puberty-blocking implant but unable to access estrogen or necessary medical monitoring. Gray described being bullied and humiliated at school, and after being kicked out by her parents at 18, she was refused entry to homeless shelters because she was trans. “I was in a place where I didn’t even know the meaning of safety anymore,” Gray told The Independent. She now lives on a docked boat near Rotterdam with 200 other asylum seekers, cycling two hours to integration classes while she appeals an initial denial.
Jane Arc, 47, a former military software contractor from California, fled after years of escalating violence and harassment. In March 2025, a driver in San Francisco screamed that they would “kill [her]” and tried to run her over. Arc, who had previously thrived in tech, said, “When the government is acting with the military, and rapidly without any kind of oversight process, that has the potential to have lots of people killed. I didn’t want to be one of them.” Now, she waits for a decision in the Ter Apel asylum seekers’ center in the Netherlands, fearing deportation and what might await her back in the U.S. “I don’t want to do this; I would give anything to live there again. But I can’t.”
As of September 2025, many transgender Americans continue to appeal asylum denials in both the Netherlands and Canada, their futures uncertain. With the U.S. still officially considered a “safe country” by many Western governments, the outcome for these asylum seekers hangs in the balance—leaving their lives, and the policies that shape them, in a precarious limbo.
