Trump has declared war on the transgender community, leaving Americans to seek asylum — from America
Early in the morning after Donald Trump’s second inauguration, a large and chaotic family of Americans — six adults, four children, and a 115lb service dog named Luka — spilled out of a plane at Amsterdam’s Schiphol Airport and told puzzled border guards that they had come to claim asylum.
Some 48 hours later they were in a Dutch refugee center, joining a growing number of transgender Americans seeking refuge in other developed countries for fear of persecution under the Trump administration.
“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,” Jey Poston, a 32-year-old transgender man and paralegal claiming refugee status in the Netherlands with his polyamorous blended family, told The Independent.
“Two of us are trans, two of us have physical disabilities, we are a multiracial family, all four of our children have autism, and we cross all spectrums of sexuality as well. So we’re just kind of a rolling ball of targets.”
Poston was one of four trans Americans seeking asylum abroad who shared their stories with The Independent. And they are not alone.
The Dutch non-profit LGBT Asylum Support s ays it is providing assistance for more than 20 trans Americans through the Netherlands’ refugee process. Canadian immigration lawyer, Yameena Ansari, says she has seen interest from American trans clients skyrocket since Trump returned to the White House.
The total number of American trans people who have emigrated is unknown, but polling suggests hundreds of thousands have moved states within the U.S. due to anti-LGBT+ legislation since 2022.
“I’m not gonna lie, when the first few people came to me… I was like ‘okay, 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: ‘whoah, this is insane.’”
Under the Trump administration, crackdowns on the trans community have escalated. Bathroom bans. Healthcare bans. Athletics bans. Bans from the military. A proposed ban on gun ownership. Compulsory misgendering at school. University LGBT+ programs shuttered. LGBT+ non-profits defunded. Blocks on obtaining passports. Child abuse investigations into parents of trans children. Attempts to force trans women into male prisons, where they are at risk of rape.
In Ansari’s eyes, it all adds up to an interlocking system of oppression that could meet Canada’s definition of “persecution”.
Whether asylum officials will agree is unclear. Both Canada and the Netherlands regard the U.S. as a safe country, and they typically want asylum seekers to show there was nowhere safer that they could move within their own nation.
In July, a Canadian judge temporarily blocked deportation of a non-binary American named Angel Jenkel, finding that conditions in the U.S. had changed enough that they might have a “reasonable fear of persecution” (although the case is complex and involves other factors).
“At this point in time we aren’t advising that Americans make asylum claims in Canada,” says Jenkel’s lawyer Sarah Mikhail.
But she says that could change if Trump is able to use the power of the federal government to disrupt LGBT+ life in blue states and cities enough that they no longer function as safe havens.
