SAGINAW, MI — The first openly-gay member of the Saginaw City Council said he plans to file for temporary residency status in Mexico.
The decision came after he saw images of a President Donald Trump social media post featuring a symbol associated with gay men imprisoned in Nazi concentration camps.
Councilman Bill Ostash said he plans in the coming weeks to visit a Mexico consulate in Detroit to apply for the temporary residency status in Puerto Vallarta, a Pacific coast city about 200 miles west of Guadalajara.
Ostash said, if he were to leave the U.S., he would flee with his husband, Kevin Rooker, a Saginaw Public Schools Board of Education member.
“I’m not saying I’m going anywhere,” Ostash said, “but if something were to happen and we needed to flee, we’re gone until we can come back safely.”
Ostash said he would choose Puerto Vallarta — which he has visited — because of its reputation as a gay-friendly community.
The councilman said his fears about living in the U.S. stem from a screenshot image circulating on social media that shows a Sunday, March 9, post shared on Trump’s Truth Social account.
The shared post links to a Washington Times opinion piece that posited the Trump-led military was “serious and prepared to fight” in part because the administration’s military recruitment efforts did not focus on attracting LGBTQ+ members.
Ostash was less concerned about the opinion piece. The councilman said he was most disturbed by the image featured in the article: an illustration of a crossed-out pink triangle.
Although later reclaimed as a symbol of gay pride, the pink triangle’s origins began in World War II-era concentration camps, where prisoners wore pink triangle-shaped badges after Nazi authorities identified them as gay or transgender.
Ostash said he interpreted the crossed-out pink triangle as a warning directed at the LGBTQ+ community familiar with the symbol’s dark, oppressive history.
“Don’t ever say it can’t happen,” Ostash wrote in a social media post earlier this week. “The Jews thought the same thing and they too voted for Hitler.”
Trump has not addressed the post publicly.
Ostash said the Truth Social post was circulated widely enough to alarm members of the LGBTQ+ community across the U.S.
Several LGBTQ+-focused media outlets have covered the issue, including Out Smart Magazine, which called the pink triangle imagery “a dangerous dog whistle.”
Ostash said he has a hard time imagining the circumstances that could lead him and Rooker to flee the U.S. for Mexico. Fear of imprisonment would trigger such action, he said.
“There would have to be something in the news (that would make us) worry we would be arrested or we would be put in a camp,” Ostash said.
The image of the Truth Social post wasn’t the first concerning sign for Ostash, he said.
The councilman said Trump’s posture toward the LGBTQ+ community has been alarming — particularly toward individuals who identify as transgender — since the presidential campaign season.
“There’s a fear,” Ostash said, describing the LGBTQ+ community watching Trump and his administration pursue policies that would impact transgender individuals' rights.
On his first day in office, Trump signed an executive order that called on the federal government to define sex as only male or female. Under the order, federal prisons and shelters for migrants and rape victims were to be segregated by sex as defined by the order.
Also in January, Trump signed an executive order aimed at cutting federal support for gender transitions for people under age 19.
Last month, a memo sent to Defense Department leaders ordered the services to set up procedures to identify troops diagnosed with or being treated for gender dysphoria by March 26. They will then have 30 days to begin removing those troops from service.
That order expanded on an earlier executive order signed by Trump that established steps toward banning transgender individuals from serving in the military. The directive has been challenged in court.
Also in February, references to transgender people were removed from a National Park Service website for the Stonewall National Monument, a park and visitor center in New York commemorating a 1969 riot that became a pivotal moment for the LGBTQ+ rights movement.
“For the government to decide they’re going to change that, no; that’s ours,” Ostash said, referring to the LGBTQ+ community. “We own that.”
Ostash said he grew especially alarmed by Trump’s position on LGBTQ+ issues when the Republican candidate during presidential campaign rallies last year regularly denounced the advancement of transgender rights.
“It’s, like, just let them live their lives,” Ostash said. “My mother raised me on the ‘golden rule’: treat others like you want to be treated.”
Saginaw voters first elected Ostash to the Saginaw City Council in 2018, making him the first openly-gay candidate to win office on the city’s nine-member, nonpartisan governing body.
After he lost a reelection bid in 2022, the council appointed him weeks later to a vacant seat on the board. Ostash last November won his latest reelection attempt.
The councilman was politically active in other ways during the 2024 election season.
Last March — one year ago this week — then-President Joe Biden campaigned in Saginaw County.
One of the then-Democratic presidential candidate’s two stops included a visit to a 131-year-old Victorian mansion owned by Ostash and Rooker.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
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