In February of 2025, NYU Langone hospital cancelled appointments for trans young people in response to a Trump executive order. Now, they’re under criminal subpoena. Charly Triballeau/Getty Images
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The Trump administration has sent subpoenas to dozens of hospitals across the nation over the past year, demanding access to information about children receiving gender-affirming care and the doctors treating them.
Those efforts have mostly failed. At least eight separate Trump administration administrative subpoenas, which would force hospitals to release trans kids’ medical records, have been thrown out. Another massive slate of DOJ subpoenas against California hospitals was dropped in January.
Now, the US Attorney’s Office in the Northern District of Texas is trying a new tactic: Its prosecutors sent out a grand jury subpoena to NYU Langone Hospital seeking confidential information about patients under age 18, according to a statement released by the hospital May 11. As S. Baum of the newsletter Erin In The Morning wrote, this means the federal government is pursuing a criminal case:
[T]his is a dire escalation…this round of subpoenas entails a criminal case, meaning providers or hospital officials face risk of arrest and jail time. It does not appear to target parents of trans kids or trans patients. News of the subpoena also means the federal government has assembled a grand jury, an important step towards criminal proceedings.
“We understand that these developments may be concerning to our patients, providers, and others,” the hospital told its patients. “Please know that NYU Langone takes the privacy of your protected health information very seriously and we are evaluating our response to the subpoena.”
Shannon Minter, the legal director of the National Center for LGBTQ Rights, called the subpoena “a blatant attempt to harass and intimidate medical providers based on the this administration’s ideological opposition to transgender people and to this healthcare.”
Since prior attempts to pressure hospitals into handing over patient information have been unsuccessful, Minter said, the Department of Justice is now trying to get that same information by pursuing federal criminal charges. And by doing so in Texas, he added, they’re attempting “to find a jurisdiction that would would likely be sympathetic to the administration’s goals.”
“It’s just an egregious abuse of federal power,” Minter said. “This is mafia-type behavior.”
This isn’t the first time NYU Langone has been targeted for its work with transgender patients. It’s the latest in a long back-and-forth between the hospital, its patients, and various government bodies. January 2025, the hospital stopped accepting new patients into its Transgender Youth Health Program following a Trump executive order which attempted to prohibit federally funded hospitals from providing gender-affirming care to minors. They were met with protests at the time. Then, just over a year later, the hospital announced it was ending that program altogether “due to the current regulatory environment,” and were met with more protests from trans kids and their families, many of whom scrambled to find care elsewhere.
In early March, New York Attorney General Letitia James ordered the hospital to resume care. On March 18, then-Deputy US Attorney General Todd Blanche sent a letter to James demanding that the hospital not reinstate trans youth care. Meanwhile, trans community advocates in New York have pressed the hospital, and New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, to do more to protect gender-affirming care for all New Yorkers.
In New York, patients and doctors are theoretically protected by a state-level “Shield Law,” which is designed to protect those seeking or providing gender-affirming or abortion-related healthcare from out-of-state retaliation. “New York has strong protections in place to protect the privacy of patient records,” a spokesperson for the New York Attorney General’s office told Mother Jones. “Every health care institution in New York should seek to protect both patients and providers.” New York’s shield law applies to criminal investigations, not just civil ones; many other state-level shield laws do not.
And there is little case law indicating how such protective legislation would hold up in the face of federal investigations—and this particular investigation is coming from a court with a track record of repeatedly ruling that trans people are not protected by federal anti-discrimination law. “This could turn out to be a very important battleground,” Minter said.
More than 40 hospitals nationwide have terminated some form of gender-affirming care since Trump took office.