Subpoenaing hospitals for the identities of transgender minors, blocked in court after court

Editor's note: federal courts quashed the subpoenas for lack of a legitimate purpose and enjoined the grand-jury demand that replaced one of them.

Following Executive Order 14187, the Justice Department in July 2025 began serving administrative subpoenas on hospitals that provide gender-affirming care to minors, seeking records sufficient to identify every patient along with their diagnoses and the clinical basis for their care. Providers and families challenged them. At least eight federal district courts across six states quashed or narrowed the subpoenas, including those served on Children's Hospital of Philadelphia, Children's National Hospital, Rhode Island Hospital, NYU Langone, and Mount Sinai. One court described the government's stated rationale as a smokescreen; another concluded that the department had issued the subpoena first and searched for a justification second.

In May 2026 the department changed instruments. It withdrew its administrative subpoena to Lucile Packard Children's Hospital at Stanford and, the following day, served a nearly identical grand-jury subpoena issued under seal by the U.S. Attorney's Office for the Northern District of Texas, at the request of an FDA criminal investigator. The hospital, its patients, and the care at issue were all in California. A subpoena of the same kind went to NYU Langone. In June 2026, Judge Katherine Polk Failla granted an emergency temporary restraining order in the New York case for a class of patients treated as minors at New York City institutions, including NYU Langone and Mount Sinai; the plaintiffs argued the subpoenas violated the Fourth and Fifth Amendments.

On July 2, 2026, Judge P. Casey Pitts granted a preliminary injunction in the California case in a 43-page opinion. He found the records had no obvious relevance to any crime indictable in Texas, that the department did not meaningfully defend the propriety of its demand, and that its need for the information was at most minimal, against a constitutionally protected privacy interest in the records. He described the shift to a distant forum as an obvious effort to avoid the courts that had ruled against the department. He rejected the argument that a grand-jury subpoena strips patients of any privacy interest, and provisionally certified a class of Packard patients treated as minors between January 2020 and May 2026, while declining to extend the class statewide for lack of evidence that other California hospitals faced the same demand. He had earlier declined to enjoin Stanford itself, holding that a private hospital is not a state actor for these purposes. The injunctions are preliminary and the department may appeal.