Ter Apel, a small, unassuming Dutch town near the German border, is a place tourists rarely have on their itinerary. There are no lovely old windmills, no cannabis-filled coffee shops and on a recent visit it was far too early for tulip season.
When foreigners end up there, it is for one reason: to claim asylum at the Netherlands’ biggest refugee camp, home to 2,000 desperate people from all around the world.
Many of the American refugees, like Jane-Michelle Arc, a 47-year-old software engineer from San Francisco, are transgender. In April last year she flew into Schiphol airport in Amsterdam and, sobbing, asked a customs officer how to claim asylum. “And they laughed because: what’s this big dumb American doing here asking about asylum? And then they realised I was serious.”
Arc said the US had become such a hostile environment for trans people that she had stopped leaving the house “unless there was an Uber waiting outside”. She said she had been abused on the street and using the ladies’ toilets, and resolved to leave the country after a frightening incident when she feared a woman was going to run her over with her truck.
This is actually part of my weekly letter writing campaign. Canada signed onto the Canada US Safe Third Country Agreement in 2002 which basically means Americans cannot seek refugee status in Canada because wherever you land on the combined territory is where you seek asylum. This means because Americans set foot in America first they cannot seek refugee status in Canada under the legal agreement. The agreement has some room for "exceptions " but it takes a lot of looking into from legal scholarship and has held a risk of American diplomatic retaliation…
Rainbow Railroad ,a Canadian based queer refugee charity, and a number of legal civil rights action groups have been campaigning for the past two years to start the process. A number of us have been writing to our MPs but with a lot of the crisises Canada has been dealing with from economic shocks and diplomatic wheeling and dealing to gain greater economic and security independence after a crash out with the US it seems to be ranked low on the agenda.
We should do more… But we’re also going through a political alliance shift the likes of which would have seemed unthinkable five years ago. It’s a shit situation and nobody seems to want to draw more agro.
Which is fucking killing me cuz I have so many trans American friends and I just want them to be actually safe 😭