I got off a seven hour FaceTime call in May of 2021 with a plan. My crush and I had been doing these weekly calls for two months now, and there was no denying it: we had a classic case of long-distance lesbian longing. We had to meet in-person. It was time to discover if these feelings would be as strong outside a screen. So I googled flights from Los Angeles to Toronto, ready to spend what I needed. But there were no flights available. The border was closed.

As an entitled American citizen, I hadn’t even considered that possibility. Sure, we were still in a pandemic, but I was about to get my second vaccine dose.

What do you mean I wasn’t allowed to cross a border?

From the first year of Biden’s presidency to the first year of Trump’s second. From the disaster of a pandemic to the disaster of a demagogue. Here we are again in unprecedented times — spoiler alert: there’s always precedence — and the good news is, eventually, I’d make it to Toronto and my long-distance longing would turn into a long-distance relationship.

But four years of going back and forth between the U.S. and Canada — now Brooklyn and Toronto — has started to feel more fraught. Trump’s obsession with trans people is surpassed by his obsession with the border. Is it just a matter of time before the border returns to pandemic restrictions? Or where I’m not allowed to leave or re-enter due to the hard-earned F on my passport?

As a white trans person with American citizenship, I’ve questioned whether these worries are founded. After all, the cruelty of the U.S. border and its enforcement was not invented by Trump. He’s putting kids in cages was a liberal rallying cry during Trump’s first term that fizzled when the he became Biden. Obama deported more than three million people — and was cruelly dismissive of critique — so is this really an issue of changed policy or just changed rhetoric? Or is it both? Have things always been bad but now they’re getting worse?

“After the debate last year, I was like I should get a gun, and then I was like, no, maybe I should leave the country,” one trans American citizen, who has asked to remain anonymous, tells me. “So I started exploring it and after Trump was shot at, I was like oh I need to get out of here this is going to get bad.” She began making plans to move to Europe. But by the time she left in January, she was three months into a new relationship. “I last saw him in March and I’m going to see him again in a couple weeks. But he’s coming to me. I’m not going back to the United States.”

“I have an F on my passport — I got it renewed last year — and I’m terrified that if I were to try to re-enter the United States they could just be like this passport is invalid. You’re just an undocumented person showing up at our border.”

She wasn’t the only person I spoke with who is no longer living in the States. Someone else who wishes to remain anonymous, who is not an American citizen and had previously lived in Boston on a work visa, returned to Europe after failing to win the visa lottery only to win it this year and turn it down.

“My partner is currently over there, but if I try to envision a future for us in the U.S. in the shorter term it feels a little scary,” she says. “My international student friends or young professionals in the U.S. have stopped traveling domestically at all because they are just afraid of what they’re going to run into at the airports. I have some friends who have posted things on social media about Palestine and now they’re in mortal fear of being stopped by ICE.”

She and her partner had previously done long distance between Boston and Atlanta, but that amount of domestic travel now feels untenable. And securing work in the same city as her partner has become even more challenging due to funding cuts from the Trump administration within her industry of aerospace engineering. “As a queer couple, it just doesn’t feel like a very stable environment to be in,” she says.

However, she still plans to visit her partner in the U.S. She suspects far less scrutiny as someone entering the country on a tourist visa with a set two-week trip. And, in the long term, they’re trying to figure out a way for her partner to join her in Europe. “In both ways it’s difficult,” she says. “Because without European citizenship it’s hard for her, and the other way around it’s hard for me.”

Meanwhile, some people don’t want to leave. “I’m filing for my citizenship now,” an anonymous Canadian citizen tells me. “I don’t want to leave and never be able to come back because I built my community and life out here.”

They’ve been going back and forth with their partner, who is also Canadian. But now they’re staying put. “Because my partner is a white dude, we feel like he has a lot more freedom of movement,” they say. “He’ll probably be gone for a month or two and then come back here.”

“We’ve had to have these really difficult conversations about our absolute red lines,” they continue. “Like if this happens, fuck all my stuff, we’re packing a bag and going to Toronto.” As a non-white, visibly queer person with a green card but no citizenship, reports of people being sent to detention facilities in El Salvador have felt close. But for the time being, they’re doubling down, committing to their citizenship application, and relying on their partner’s privilege.

This was something I heard a lot — people in relationships making risk assessments based on the race, citizenship status, and gender identities involved. “My partner presents as a white cis woman and she’s Canadian so I don’t necessarily think she is who is being targeted at the border,” a trans American citizen named Jaclyn tells me. “But I think the idea of me traveling there has felt a little more charged.”

Jaclyn says they’ve been talking less about the dangers of a visit and more about a scenario where leaving the U.S. becomes a necessity. “I am really scared,” she says. “I know that’s the intention, but I don’t think it’s an empty intention. I think sometimes it can be dismissed as, oh they want you to be scared, and that implies nothing is actually going to happen. But, no, they want you to be scared, because they’re doing something scary.”

Jaclyn notes that the current administration’s desires to criminalize transness and to deport criminals are connected. This becomes especially harrowing when we consider how queer people, especially trans people, have long been treated by the U.S. in immigration prisons.

Jaclyn also has a partner in Los Angeles where she lives and they’ve made it clear that were they to leave they’d leave together — something she says would be expected by her partner in Canada. “I think a lot of a relationship, especially now, is taking turns in who’s the one who’s afraid and who’s the one who’s strong,” she says. “And in some ways being poly is great because there are more people to be strong and in some ways it’s hard because there are more people to be afraid.”

Most of the people I spoke to had purposefully avoided crossing the U.S. border since Trump took office. But Jack had just returned from their most recent visit to their girlfriend in Dublin under the new administration. “Normally, they’d just ask me what I was doing in Ireland and if I have anything to declare, and then my American passport whisks me through,” they say. But this time the agent grilled them about their outfit — a pink trucker hat and blue and white Letterman jacket with magenta skulls and butterflies, which Jack admitted probably made them seem like an AI generated trans person. “I eventually told him I bought everything at a Bushwick craft fair — never thought I’d admit that to a federal agent — and he let me go on my way.”

It’s difficult to know when heightened scrutiny is a result of the Trump administration and when it’s due to an overzealous agent. As someone who has crossed the U.S./Canada border a lot over the last four years, I’ve experienced a wide range of responses to my transness, from Cringe Ally to Power-Hungry Hardass. It’s inevitable to latch onto anecdotes — whether that’s our own experiences or individuals whose detention or deportation makes the news — but how many other horrors are hidden within statistics?

“I think the reason people from Canada and Europe and Australia are reporting these terrible incidents — which are not okay, detaining people over night is insane — but I feel like it’s getting a lot more traction because it’s never really happened to people from those places before,” Anna, whose partner lives in Mexico says. “At least not in the public eye.”

While she acknowledges she knows two people who just came in from Mexico without a problem, Anna is still scared because the stakes are so high. “We’re very in love and been planning on marriage,” she says. “We’ve been together for about three years and we were planning on marrying sometime in the next two years. But because of all this, we’re expediting it.”

She’s planning on visiting her partner in Mexico and then her partner is coming to the U.S. in July. This border crossing is the source of most of her anxieties. “We’re going to ask my lawyer if getting married in Mexico first is a good idea, because we really don’t know what would look better,” she says. “It’s this game of figuring out what would look shady and what wouldn’t even though everything is legitimate anyway!”

There’s an added unpredictability to this current moment, but Anna’s fears remind her of another time a year into her and her partner’s relationship. Anna’s sister was getting married and Anna was living in Mexico at the time with her partner. She really wanted them to be able to travel with her to the States. “I heard how much of a horrorshow it was to get a visa for the U.S. from Mexico,” she says. “They make it so hard.”

“You just don’t know. There are so many ifs and buts of oh you’re missing this one thing or if they suspect you don’t have enough ties to the country, they just won’t give it to you. And sometimes it’s very arbitrary. They’re just like, no. I felt very lucky that they were able to get one. It just sucks because after all of that stress we went through two years ago, it’s the same thing again now.”

Whether leaving the U.S. or trying to get back, terrified or resigned, everyone I spoke to says they feel less at ease to travel. It’s fun to make jokes about lesbians U-Hauling and queer people falling in love through phone screens, but the truth is we often find friendship, community, and romance from afar out of necessity. Even in the most progressive city, we’re still a minority, and it’s even more necessary for people in small towns. Queer people have always found each other and we always will. But tighter borders and increased horror from ICE make this more difficult.

“A philosophy I’ve tried to adopt is I’m just trying to find as much joy as I can every day,” the U.S. citizen who moved to Europe tells me. “I’m going to hold onto what I can because who knows what could happen next month, next year. It’s all ephemeral. That’s the story of queer life and queer joy. Trying to find as much as you can, but you can’t bank on the future in any meaningful or tangible way.”

With that in mind, I’m grateful to be with my partner right now in Toronto. I’m grateful, because we’re together and because I fear a time in the near future when we’re kept apart by a closed border. But I’m not ready to give up on the U.S. as some friends and family have suggested I should.

Jack echoes my feelings, saying, “If and when tyranny comes knocking at home, the vast majority of my friends and neighbors do not have the resources (or a beautiful Irish girlfriend) to secure their escape. So I’m kind of caught between the twin impulses of get me the hell out of here and actually, fuck you.”

“I’ll always be invested in fighting for a less fucked up America. What that looks like or from where is anyone’s guess at this point.”

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