A federal judge in New York on Wednesday rejected the Trump administration’s efforts to subpoena medical records of minors who sought gender-affirming care at NYU Langone Hospitals, ruling from the bench that the grand jury subpoena sought an unconstitutional breadth of sensitive health information.
U.S. District Judge Katherine Polk Failla provisionally certified a class of patients who received care from the New York City provider over the past six years and issued a temporary restraining order barring investigators from accessing the records. The subpoena had been issued to NYU Langone through a federal grand jury in Texas.
“The scope of information sought by the government here, which includes medical assessments, diagnoses, informed consent records, and revelation of plaintiffs’ transgender status, is significant,” Failla said, adding that the health data falls “squarely within the class of intimate materials warranting the strongest constitutional protection.”
The subpoena demanded that the hospital release documents “sufficient to identify every patient who underwent sex-rejecting procedures” along with all related records “from initial consultation to the most recent treatment provided.” It also demanded records showing authorizations from parents for their minor children to receive care.
Failla questioned whether any crime justified the scope of the demand.
“Because I cannot conceive of a crime that would require the breadth of disclosures in the subpoena — identifying and sensitive medical information for an entire class of people for a six-year period — I have to find that the government’s interest does not outweigh the plaintiffs’ interest in privacy,” Failla said.
The judge also expressed skepticism about the Justice Department’s assurances that patients would not face criminal prosecution. Statements made by the department implied that patients could be criminally prosecuted, she noted.
“I’m hard pressed for reasons to rely on the government’s representations that even the patients would not be prosecuted, especially given the inability to comment on any aspect of the alleged investigation or the subpoena,” Failla said.
The parents of several children who received treatment in New York City asked Failla to block the records from being released, saying they feared retaliation by the Trump administration.
Failla pointed to other federal court rulings that have blocked the release of medical records in similar cases and said prosecutors were “undeterred by its disastrous showing in the courts” in their effort to obtain the information. She criticized the Justice Department’s “efforts to recast discredited civil administrative subpoenas as grand jury subpoenas from a hand-picked, far-away jurisdiction in order to minimize judicial review of constitutional infirmities.”
The ruling is the latest in a series of court defeats for the administration’s push to obtain medical records from hospitals that provide gender-affirming care to transgender youth. MSI previously reported that a federal judge in Rhode Island blocked similar DOJ subpoenas in May, and another judge blocked the administration from seeking records in a separate case that same month.
NYU Langone said in May that it had received the subpoena, and the class action lawsuit was filed about a month later to stop the release. The hospital stopped providing gender-identity care for minors this year after the administration threatened to pull federal funding. Other hospitals have also ended their programs under government pressure.
Chase Strangio, an American Civil Liberties Union attorney representing the plaintiffs, said in a statement that the families are “thankful the court has granted our emergency request to protect the privacy interests of transgender New Yorkers and their families.”
“Patients and families trust their doctors with their most intimate, private information and should trust in turn that this information will be protected from impermissible and harassing demands for disclosure from the federal government or anyone else,” Strangio said.
The plaintiffs are also represented by Lambda Legal and the New York Civil Liberties Union.
Omar Gonzalez-Pagan, senior counsel and healthcare strategist at Lambda Legal, applauded the ruling.
“Our laws and our Constitution recognize that we all have a right to confidentiality about the most intimate and private information about ourselves,” Gonzalez-Pagan said. “Whether a young person receives any type of medical care is a decision for that patient, their family and their doctor, not for political appointees to decide, interfere with or know.”
Stanford University’s Lucile Salter Packard Children’s Hospital also received a grand jury subpoena from prosecutors in Texas conducting the investigation into gender-identity care, according to the hospital. A group of patients who received care there are seeking a similar court order to prevent their records from being released.