I am an asylum seeker.

Deconstructing why I left

How I got here is a long story that will take me months or years to get through, so I think introductions are in order. My name is Sienna and I am 34 years old. I was a US Marine during Operation Enduring Freedom, I’m a systems engineer by trade, a lesbian in my personal life, and now, an asylum seeker.

I will do my best to relay what happened clearly & concisely, however it happened over the course of a few months and with an extreme amount of detail. It is all so intertwined that it’s hard to give enough context - let alone all of it - in a linear fashion. I expect most of this will get expanded into later posts over time.

Disclaimer: this is not legal advice, nor is this immigration advice. Every refugee's journey is deeply personal and profoundly unique. The experiences and circumstances that lead to seeking refuge vary dramatically from person to person. This is my story and unique to me.

The Why

Let’s first start with why.

I think the most important piece of context is that I am alone. My biological parents were abusive, manipulative, and bigoted my entire life, most of my extended family is exceedingly bigoted, I am unmarried, my biological sisters live on different continents, and aside from my teenager living in a state I cannot safely visit, I have no roommates, I am alone. It would be weeks before even my closest friends would notice I’m missing. This isn’t a judgement but a statement and my reality. This makes me exceedingly vulnerable as there is not anyone to fight for me, if my disappearance is noticed at all.

Above and beyond that, I am nonbinary. Not militantly, but firmly. It is a part of who I am and influenced by genetics. If you’re wondering what my “sub-gender” is, don’t. I don’t have one and I am not agender, I am nonbinary. The Trump administration came for me & my kind one day one. I have documented proof of my choice to use “F” on my sex documents instead of “X” for my own safety because I was worried about this. This makes me highly vulnerable because the world is built for a male-female existence, with any deviation being frowned upon, shunned, or purely disallowed. Discrimination is already happening. If I lose my passport, I can’t get another one.

According to my legal birth certificate, only one of my biological parents is American, the other is listed as German. While nominally inconsequential because of the 14th Amendment to the US Constitution, the Trump administration telling a US citizen to self-deport from my home county changes things. There’s also the repeated violations of the 14th amendment… while illegal and being fought in court, compliance-in-advance has meant multiple US citizens have gotten deported. The Trump administration also wants to legalize deporting US citizens. This, in addition with being alone, makes me very vulnerable because what happens when decide to come after me? It’s not if, it’s when.

I am both a veteran and former federal employee. During my time in the US Marine Corps, I served a combat tour to Helmand, Afghanistan in 2010 as a systems engineer and occasional attache to the CIA; I also maintained a security clearance. While I was a federal employee, I had the pleasure of serving as one of the principal engineers for cloud.gov, an advisor to the Presidential Innovation Fellowship group, and helped build coronavirus.gov during the pandemic. I also worked for the company that built the original technology half of the federal government’s modern tech stack runs on. This makes me vulnerable because I am a highly skilled, disenfranchised veteran & former federal research employee who has an exceedingly high amount of knowledge of the federal government and it’s technology; I am a threat to the Trump administration.

I am queer. I have been very open, public, and proud of it for a long time. I have 165,000 views on one of my accounts for the photos I took of Denver Pride. I tried to buy one of the last lesbian bars in the US to save it from closing. However, now that DHS is allowed to spy on me, they have been. On April 15th, someone tried to hack into my phone. Thankfully, I had every security measure on my phone enabled, so all it did was trigger some error and a hard reset undid whatever they tried. I highly suspect it was DHS because no one else would have a reason to target me. This makes me very vulnerable in today’s digital age because it’s impossible not to have a digital footprint; DHS can track my whereabouts, who I was with, what I said, etc. If you have doubts, they’re still collecting the same data Snowden went public about.

The federal government has also removed “T” from “LGBT” in every single reference. They’re denying trans people visas under the guise of “athletes”. They’re also denying trans people passports. They kicked trans people out of the military. They’re calling LGBTQ+ healthcare “gender ideology” and trying to remove any reference to it.

I am on hormone therapy. Due to the length of time I have been on them, I cannot stop them without severe medical consequences. The challenge with this is that HHS, under the Trump administration, is actively eroding transgender healthcare. They are framing it as a risk to trans youth, however the implications here are wide. The Trump administration could tell the FDA to revoke the approval of my medications and I would be in serious trouble. This makes me very vulnerable as my physical health depends on “controversial” medication. Especially when my own clinic has already ceased to provide healthcare for trans youth.

On May 7th, 2025, Real ID went into effect. This means you will need a national-compliant ID in order to use commercial domestic airline travel. While this is a problem for a great many people, the problem for me is that I have gone through a name & gender change across all my documents, and that change is tracked in all the verifying systems. It would be insanely easy to flag me in a nationally-monitored system at security checkpoints. Going to prison would be an insanely dangerous game as trans women are now being held in men’s prisons. I am not a trans woman, but I don’t think the bigots care that much.

And finally, my teenager. I won’t post details to protect their privacy, but I have a teenage child living in southern Florida with their other parent, my former spouse. While the relationship I have with my former spouse is wonderful, I cannot safely go visit my child because of cases like Marcy Rheintgen - a trans woman facing jail time for using the bathroom. I haven’t seen my child in almost 6 years because it is too dangerous for us - what happens if we’re out together and a stranger starts something? Not only will my child have to see that, it could be life-threatening if I can’t deescalate it fast enough.

In case there are any doubts about how bad things are in the United States for queer people, I encourage you to read Erin Reed’s blog about it. Her community maintains a list of the almost 900 laws that have been filed against us.

Anti-Trans National Risk Assessment Map: March Edition

In summation to why I left:

• My government is trying to erase my:

  • Healthcare

  • Freedoms

  • Rights

  • Existence

• My government is actively:

  • Spying on me

  • Trying to break into my devices to spy on me even more

  • Illegally arresting people from:

    • My home county

    • My most recent county of record

  • Implementing mandatory nationally-monitored security checkpoints

  • Illegally deporting jus soli US citizens

  • Illegally denying due process

  • Illegally deporting immigrants to concentration camps

  • Attempting to legalize the deportation of jus soli US citizens

The Risk

Most people do not realize Americans are generally unable to successfully seek asylum in nearly every developed country in the world. This is partly why the case of then Edward Snowden, now Jonathan Edward Durham, is so important: it showcases there are few places Americans can truly go in an attempt to escape our increasingly hostile government. This is in part because the US is considered to be a “safe country of origin”.¹

The "safe country of origin" designation is a crucial concept in international asylum law that significantly impacts Americans, like me, seeking refuge abroad. Essentially, countries designated as "safe" are those where governments are generally considered to respect human rights and protect their citizens from persecution. Citizens from these designated "safe" countries face substantially higher barriers when applying for asylum elsewhere, as there's a presumption they don't need international protection. This classification has created a situation where, despite individual circumstances that might warrant protection, we as American citizens often find our asylum claims dismissed or rejected².

In June 2013, then Edward Snowden snuck highly classified documents out of the US and gave them to a reporter in Hong Kong. He then proceeded to immediately struggle with where to go because he is all but guaranteed to not have proper due process and a fair trial in the United States. Every country in the European Union (EU), the EU, and pretty much every other country in the world would either hand him over (to prevent the wrath of the US) or the US would send a military operation in to retrieve him. For him, as a supposed enemy of the state, the only safe place has been Russia. I think this is the perfect example of an American absolutely needing asylum from the United States and being unable to find it anywhere except with our longest enemy (socialism doesn’t count).

What makes this concept particularly relevant to my situation is that it creates a significant legal hurdle for me seeking asylum abroad, even when facing genuine threats to my safety, healthcare access, or fundamental rights. However, there have been several LGBTQ+ travel advisories to the US (at the time of writing), and I have a list 88 pages long of names of laws that have been filed in 2025 against my kind. Thankfully, the Trump administration keeps giving me more and more evidence as to why it’s unsafe for me.

The risk, to put it succinctly, is there is a chance my asylum request will be denied³. However, and in fairness to the process, I have to let it run it’s course. The small perk is I won’t be sent back to the US, but that’s only a small consolation in a multi-year process. At the end of the day, it is a legal process involving the courts, and I will have all the proper processes and chances to bring my case before the judiciary.

There are, long-term, other risks, such as but not limited to: another EU country accepting my application, inability to find a job, homelessness, inability to make friends, etc., however those are part of the risks of being an asylum seeker/refugee on the whole and I will not cover them in this post.

Now What?

Since leaving the United States on April 30th, I have officially applied for asylum in Portugal. The process is long, tedious, and filled bureaucracy. There is some comfort in the process being this way because it gives a sense that some things are the same everywhere. My entire life has changed and been turned upside down; anything familiar, even if just a feeling, is a comfort. Even if that means walking from one building to another to wait in line for a human to fill out a form which I then walk to a different building.

Until my asylum application is fully processed, my next steps are finding a job, getting my own place to live, and starting my life over from scratch. It will be a long journey that takes years, but I am okay with that. There are worse things. I think my favorite advice from the Marine Corps is most relevant here:

Today will be different and every day comes to an end.

1. Opinion: I suspect this will slowly change, likely with the EU Asylum Report for 2026 coming out in Oct 2027. However, that is years away and I do not think it was possible for me personally to have safely stayed in the US that long.

2. Comment: I only know that it’s harder, I haven’t dug through the data. I suspect there is virtually no data on American refugees.

3. Opinionated Concern: specifically because I am a US citizen.