Naomi Seibt near her family house in Munster, Germany, in 2020, at age 19. Seibt is seeking asylum in the United States for alleged persecution in Germany for her right-wing activities. Photo / Sebastien Van Malleghem, for The Washington Post
A prominent far-right German activist has applied for political asylum in the United States, citing fears for her safety, as the Trump Administration has signalled plans to prioritise protections for white refugees and Europeans who claim they are being targeted for their populist views.
The activist, Naomi Seibt, is a social media influencer and supporter of the nationalist, anti-immigration Alternative for Germany (AfD) party, which German authorities have labelled extremist.
Seibt, 25, said she is being persecuted in Germany for her political views - the “target of intelligence surveillance” and “state media defamation” - and has received “death threats from antifa”, referring to a loosely knit movement of activists who oppose fascism.
Seibt shared a letter from German domestic intelligence documenting its tracking of her activities, which she said prompted her decision to seek asylum.
“That’s the moment when I thought, I cannot return to Germany safely,” Seibt said in an interview from Washington, where she is living while her asylum application is processed.
Asylum is more commonly sought by people fleeing war or repressive regimes in countries with justice systems that offer little protection.
The rare application from a citizen of a wealthy Western democracy comes amid increasingly close ties between Germany’s far-right and prominent figures in US President Donald Trump’s Maga movement.
Residents of Germany live in peaceful conditions with a strong social safety net, including some of the world’s best healthcare, and an established rule-of-law tradition.
They also have access to the European Union’s Court of Justice and the European Court of Human Rights.
Seibt, who has more than 459,000 followers on X and 112,000 subscribers on YouTube, said she is in regular contact with billionaire Elon Musk and took credit for helping arrange a live chat on X between Musk and AfD co-leader Alice Weidel ahead of German federal elections in February.
Seibt met on October 30 with Representative Anna Paulina Luna (Republican-Florida), who said that she is “personally assisting” with Seibt’s asylum application and making her case to Secretary of State Marco Rubio.
In 2020, Seibt was the subject of a Washington Post profile highlighting her paid work for a think-tank allied with the Trump Administration casting doubt on the scientific consensus around climate change.
Now, she says she feels unsafe in Germany, where speech that incites hatred, threatens public order or attacks human dignity is illegal.
Seibt alleges that German police refused to protect her when she contacted them about death threats she had received.
“I genuinely seek protection from the US because I fear for my life, for my family’s life,” Seibt said.
Germany’s domestic intelligence service, the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution (BfV), declined to comment on the alleged surveillance of Seibt, saying it does not speak about individual cases.
Seibt, who is originally from Munster in western Germany, has lived primarily in the US in the past year. She called herself “the first German applying for asylum under President Trump due to political persecution”.
Seibt shared a document from the US Citizenship and Immigration Services confirming receipt of her asylum application. In the past, only a handful of Western Europeans have sought and been granted asylum in the US.
The Trump Administration has already granted refuge to dozens of White South Africans who claimed to be persecuted at home.
The Administration is contemplating a broader overhaul of the refugee resettlement process to prioritise such Afrikaners at the expense of groups traditionally seen as fleeing danger and persecution.
A draft proposal from the State Department also would give consideration to “free speech advocates in Europe”, according to a former US official who had seen the document.
The New York Times reported that Administration proposals would also prioritise Europeans who have been “targeted for peaceful expression of views online such as opposition to mass migration or support for ‘populist’ political parties”.
Still, the fate of Seibt’s claim is uncertain.
“One of the first questions about this is whether the Department of Homeland Security will scrutinise this asylum application as rigorously as they do others, because it’s a pretty difficult status to win,” said Michael Kagan, a professor of immigration law at the University of Nevada at Las Vegas.
US asylum law requires a “well-founded fear of persecution” based on race, religion, nationality, political opinion or membership in a particular social group.
Claims from democracies with strong legal protections and political freedoms rarely meet that bar, Kagan noted.
But, he said, the broader interpretation of free speech in the US compared with most of Europe might prompt American courts to take Seibt’s case seriously.
Seibt said she filed her asylum request before the Trump Administration proposals surfaced, but she views them as a validation of her claim.
She said she’s optimistic “because my beliefs strongly align with the Trump Administration’s”.
The State Department declined to comment on Seibt’s case. A spokesperson said the department was “extremely concerned by increasing censorship by EU bureaucrats and government officials”, adding that the US “supports all Europeans working to defend our common civilisational heritage”.
The US takes an unusually expansive view of free speech under the First Amendment.
Germany, shaped by its Nazi past, guarantees free expression but with limits. Hate speech, Holocaust denial, and Nazi propaganda are prohibited.
This approach has drawn criticism from Trump allies. In Munich in February, shortly before Germany’s federal elections, US Vice-President JD Vance denounced the country’s mainstream political parties for their “fire wall” against forming any governing coalitions with AfD.
Vance’s comments and Musk’s backing of AfD were criticised in Germany as election interference.
AfD finished second in the election and, according to some opinion polls, is the most popular party in the country, pulling ahead of Chancellor Friedrich Merz’s centre-right Christian Democratic Union. Some politicians seek to ban the AfD for what they say are efforts to subvert the constitution.
Seibt said she recently received notice from German authorities accusing her of incitement to hatred - though she said she did not know which social media post triggered the accusation.
Seibt winning asylum could become a flash point in the transatlantic debate on free speech.
“It doesn’t take much to imagine a Trump Administration or someone like this person using an asylum application in a similar way to show what they see as moral superiority over the German approach to regulating political speech,” Kagan said.
As she awaits a decision, Seibt said she is connecting with other European “thought leaders” who want to “deconstruct the European Union” and replace it with a system with stronger free speech protections.
In a video announcing her asylum claim, Seibt described herself as “the bridge between Germany and the Maga movement”.
Her ties to the American right have deepened in recent years, particularly after Musk reposted her videos endorsing the AfD in December.
After Seibt announced her asylum effort, she said, Luna - who in January introduced legislation to carve Trump’s likeness into Mount Rushmore - contacted her.
“It is clear that, due to her support for President Trump and her refusal to conform to leftist ideology, she has been targeted and could face imprisonment/physical danger if she returns to Germany - simply for rejecting the group-think that is currently dominating the country and destroying its economy,” Luna wrote in a statement on X, posted with a photo of the two women in Luna’s office.
Late last month, Luna also met in Washington with AfD lawmaker Anna Rathert, the latest AfD member of the German parliament to meet US officials in recent weeks.
After one such visit in early October, Reuters reported, two AfD lawmakers were serenaded at a New York Young Republican Club reception with the taboo first stanza of Germany’s national anthem, a verse associated with Nazi-era nationalism and supremacy.
Last week, Alex Bruesewitz, a social media architect of Trump’s 2024 campaign and senior adviser to a Trump-affiliated PAC, was the featured guest on a panel hosted by AfD’s parliamentary group titled “The global battle for truth: How conservatives can regain control of the narrative”.
Seibt said Germany’s right-wing movement draws “enormous courage” from Trump’s success.
“I think this is a beautiful communication between the AfD and America because we pursue the same goals,” she said. “We want free speech.”
Her ambitions for Germany, she said, can be achieved only from outside the country, “not behind bars”.
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