Four trans Americans claiming refuge abroad tell Io Dodds why they no longer feel safe in their home country, from fears of martial law to being arrested in changing rooms

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.

"There are a lot of changes being floated that I think could contribute to this threshold being met... it's being heavily discussed among refugee lawyers."

On April 19, Hannah Kreager and her parents finally reached the Canadian frontier after a long drive from Arizona. Kreager hugged them goodbye, then drove across the border.

Kreager had been worried since before the election, when she started reading Project 2025 -- the ultra-conservative blueprint for a second Trump term that calls for "transgender ideology" to be outlawed entirely.

Yet when reports began circulating that Trump might invoke martial law on April 20, Kreager's father told her: "I'm getting you out of here before the 20th." (So far, it hasn't happened.)

The idea that American trans people might have a claim to asylum came as a shock to Kreager's lawyer, Yameena Ansari, who is queer and vividly remembers living under martial law in Pakistan as a child.

"Even earlier in this [interview], I felt like I sounded crazy," she says. "But this is not going to be the end of it... my clients are canaries in the coal mine."

Kreager believes that the danger is heightened by Trump's alliance with tech oligarchs. "In Nazi Germany, there weren't surveillance cameras. There wasn't facial recognition... nowadays, your phone microphone could be recording everything," she says. "It's f***ing terrifying."

For now she is living in Calgary, Alberta on a temporary work permit while she awaits her hearing.

"I would love to be wrong," she says. "I want to be proven wrong so f***ing badly."

Jey Poston flew from Atlanta, Georgia to Amsterdam on January 19, carrying 35lb of printed-out evidence that he felt proved that the U.S. was no longer safe for him.

His family is "a little bit unique", he says. The nine-person 'polycule' (one member has split since arriving in the Netherlands) is bound by a complex web of romantic and platonic relationships, and by a shared commitment to raising the group's children together.

Now, the entire group is in a "weird purgatory", staying in government housing in Burgum, a small town around 160 miles from Amsterdam, while they appeal their initial rejections under the "safe country" policy.

Living in "deep MAGA territory" in northeastern Georgia, Poston was used to violence and harassment, he says. But in the months after the 2024 election, he says these incidents roughly tripled.

In a single week, strangers hammered on his window screaming slurs; pushed him, shoulder-checked him, spat on him, and barred him from a non-gendered single-stall bathroom, he claimed.

And after President Trump's decision to pardon more than 1,500 January 6 rioters. Poston was convinced that he could not count on law enforcement if organized hate groups decided to target his family.

Now, while he waits for a decision in the Netherlands, Poston is volunteering at a recently-formed refugee support group, Help Me Leave, while finally beginning his medical transition. He took 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,'" laughs Poston.

When Texas banned all transition healthcare for under-18s in September 2023, it left Solène Gray with an unusual problem: she still had a puberty-blocking implant inside her body.

The implant meant Gray, then 17, could no longer produce her own hormones, but nor could she legally access the estrogen her body needed to mature. The ban also prevented the regular blood tests and bone scans she needed to monitor her health.

The ban didn't come in isolation. Having started transitioning at 10 years old, Gray says she was regularly bullied and humiliated at school, by both pupils and teachers, before allegedly being kicked out onto the streets by her parents at age 18.

In her asylum application in the Netherlands, she wrote that she was refused entry to homeless shelters in her hometown of Dallas because she was trans, and later suspended from work after reporting a colleague's death threats to HR.

"I was in a place where I didn't even know the meaning of safety anymore," Gray tells The Independent.

Gray said that moving to a more LGBT+friendly city was not an option due to the high cost of living in blue states and her lack of qualifications, as well as Trump's ongoing campaign to deploy federal law enforcement into Democrat-run cities.

She is now living on a docked boat outside Rotterdam that houses about 200 asylum seekers, cycling two hours to cultural integration classes while she appeals her initial denial.

This March, Jane Arc was crossing the road in San Francisco when a driver started screaming out their window that they were "going to kill [her]" -- and gunned their truck as if to run her over.

Street violence was nothing new. Before 2012, she had a thriving career as a military software contractor, building digital weapons for America's war on terror. Then she came out, was forced to leave her job, and faced harassment or physical assault almost weekly until she largely stopped going outside on foot.

Arc was attacked during both the Obama and Trump administrations, and the experience had left her jaded. But Trump's second term still shocked her, with its flurry of executive orders, apparent flouting of the separation of powers, and use of soldiers to suppress protest.

"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," she says. "When you're fighting the government, you just can't win. And I learned that working for the government."

As a successful trans athlete, she also felt personally targeted by Trump's orders on sport. She has had cops called on her in changing rooms before, so she now feared being arrested at the gym, she said. Her height (6'3) makes her especially vulnerable, often preventing her from blending in among cis people.

By March, she was suffering constant, disabling anxiety headaches. If all this was happening even in a city renowned as an LGBT+ haven, she thought, how could anywhere in the country be safe?

"There is no reason to leave [a life] as a software engineer in San Francisco to live in rural Holland in a small square room," she says. "I don't want to do this; I would give anything to live there again. But I can't."

As she waits for a decision in the Ter Apel asylum seekers' center in the Netherlands, Arc is pessimistic about her chances. She says Dutch government employees have told her they don't want to "p*** off" the U.S. by branding it an unsafe country.

She expects to be deported, and when that happens she fears that the Trump administration will find some pretext to imprison her with men.

"I don't want to be the person that makes the Netherlands decide it's not safe for trans people [in the U.S.], and change their policy," she says. "But I suspect that one of us would have to get killed for that to change.

Trump's war on trans people has left Americans seeking asylum -- from America