The Department of Justice quietly dropped its appeal this week in a Pennsylvania case where it had demanded the private medical records of transgender children treated at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center. No explanation. No press conference. Just a short motion to the Third Circuit asking it to go away.
Let’s be clear about what happened here: the federal government spent nearly a year trying to seize the confidential healthcare files of children, got told no by a federal judge in language that should haunt every official involved, and then slunk away from the appeal rather than defend the indefensible in open court.
US District Judge Cathy Bissoon quashed the subpoena in December 2025. She didn’t mince words. She called the DOJ’s actions “unprecedented.” She flagged the department’s “incendiary characterization” of gender-affirming care as evidence of its “ill-intent.” She wrote that the government’s arguments showed “callous indifference, if not abject cruelty” toward trans people. And she noted that “the general public” may not even grasp “how broad the government’s campaign is against transgender people.”
She is right, and we need to say it louder.
This was never about fraud. The DOJ has issued more than 20 administrative subpoenas to hospitals and clinics across the country, demanding patient files, personnel records, billing data, and documents “sufficient to identify every patient.” Government attorneys could not articulate what crime they were investigating. They pointed instead to Donald Trump’s stated goal of ending gender-affirming care for youth. That is not a legal basis. That is a political vendetta dressed up in prosecutorial clothing.
Shannon Minter, legal director of the National Center for LGBTQ Rights, called it plainly: “It is pure harassment.” Georgetown Law professor Abbe Smith said she “can’t think of an analogous situation.” Craig Konnoth, a health law professor at the University of Virginia, warned that the government’s moves could have effects “far beyond transgender youth” because they amount to the power to “come after you, hoping they’ll be able to catch you out in something.”
And here is what should keep every one of us awake: the retreat in Pennsylvania does not mean the campaign is over. It means the strategy has shifted. After administrative subpoenas were quashed in court after court by judges appointed by presidents of both parties, prosecutors pivoted to grand jury subpoenas routed through a federal court in the Northern District of Texas, where the only judge is Reed O’Connor, a George W. Bush appointee with a long record of hostility toward LGBTQ rights. Grand jury subpoenas are historically difficult to challenge. The DOJ is shopping for a friendlier forum because it lost everywhere else.
NYU Langone and Stanford’s Lucile Packard Children’s Hospital have both confirmed receiving grand jury subpoenas. NYU said it was “one of several institutions.” We do not know how many more. We do know that hospitals nationwide, including NYU, have already shut down their gender-affirming care programs under legal and financial pressure from this administration. The subpoenas and the funding threats are working together. The goal was never just to read medical files. The goal was to make care disappear.
Mimi McKenzie of the Public Interest Law Center, which represented the Pennsylvania families, put it precisely: “In seeking these records, the administration’s goal was to scare patients from seeking this healthcare and intimidate providers from offering it.” She added that the fear was not speculation but was “based on the statements of Trump’s own people, including the then-attorney general.”
One parent, identified in court papers as Riley Roe, said what every family in this country should be able to say without fear: “I am afraid about what may result from releasing my child’s identity to an administration that is hostile to the transgender community. I fear that his name may go on a list of transgender people and that he will be investigated simply for receiving medical care.”
That fear is rational. That fear is the intended product of policy. And that is exactly why solidarity is not optional right now.
The Pennsylvania families won because they organized, sued, and refused to comply quietly. Six families in California won a temporary restraining order because they did the same. Families in New York are heading to court this month. The legal infrastructure holding this campaign at bay exists because people built it, funded it, and showed up.
So here is the call: support the organizations doing this work, the National Center for LGBTQ Rights, the Public Interest Law Center, the ACLU, and the local groups fighting in every state. Show up at the courthouses. Call your representatives and demand oversight hearings on a DOJ that uses prosecutorial power to harass children’s doctors. And if you are a provider or a parent or a patient, know that every court that has actually examined these subpoenas has seen them for what they are.
The administration retreated in Pennsylvania because it could not win. Make sure it cannot win anywhere else.