A transgender software engineer from San Francisco who dramatically fled the United States after President Donald Trump’s reelection has returned home from a notorious Dutch asylum center, confessing that abandoning America was “the dumbest thing I’ve ever done.”
Jane-Michelle Arc, 48, left the U.S. in April 2025, flew into Amsterdam’s Schiphol Airport, and tearfully asked for asylum. Dutch officials reportedly laughed at the “big dumb American” before realizing she was serious.
Arc was sent to Ter Apel, the Netherlands’ largest asylum reception center, which houses thousands of migrants primarily from Syria, Eritrea, Somalia, Turkey, Algeria, Morocco, and other regions.
There, the reality of Europe’s open-borders experiment hit hard. Arc repeatedly complained of anti-trans hostility from fellow asylum seekers. In interviews with the Dutch outlet PowNews and, earlier, with The Guardian, she described the camp as terrifying.
“This is the dumbest thing I’ve ever done,” Arc admitted of her “wildly stupid” decision to flee.
“The situation I have in the US as a trans person, not good, right? But here, I will be hurt or killed.” She said it was too dangerous even to walk to the grocery store, noting yellow-vested security because of frequent stabbings.
Dat het door asielzoekers in Ter Apel voor transpersonen onveiliger is dan in het Amerika van Trump moet flink wat cognitieve dissonantie in het linkse brein veroorzaken. pic.twitter.com/37EONav4WA
— Sander van Dam (@Sandervandam2) July 13, 2026
The area around Ter Apel had been declared a safety risk zone after a series of fights and knife attacks. Even the Red Cross raised alarms about conditions.
Arc had painted America as a dystopia for transgender people after Trump’s victory, citing fears over discrimination protections, passports, and street harassment in liberal San Francisco of all places. Friends and acquaintances warned her against the move, but she proceeded anyway, claiming there was “no other option.”
After failing to win asylum, Dutch authorities treat the United States as a safe country of origin and have rejected similar American claims, Arc returned to California last month.
True to form, she quickly resumed complaining: America is “really, really loud and overwhelming” and “everything is so expensive.”
San Francisco groceries, she noted, make Dutch prices look reasonable. She still claimed “transphobia is quite overt” back home, yet conceded the U.S. felt more comfortable than the camp full of migrants from cultures that often view transgender ideology with open hostility, according to The New York Post.
The warning signs were there long before Arc returned home.
In April, The Gateway Pundit reported that LGBTQ Americans seeking asylum in the Netherlands were being rejected. Seventy-six Americans applied for asylum there in 2025, up from nine in 2024, according to figures cited by The Guardian from the Dutch asylum and immigration ministry.
Arc’s story is the predictable result of years of left-wing fearmongering that treated a second Trump term as an existential threat while ignoring the actual dangers created by uncontrolled immigration.
She fled the freest, most prosperous country on earth for a violent asylum center and learned the hard way that the “dumbest thing” was believing the propaganda.
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