Bay Area families sue to block DOJ from getting transgender children's Stanford medical records

SAN JOSE, Calif. — Parents of transgender children who received care at Stanford’s children’s hospital are asking a federal judge to stop the hospital from turning over their children’s identities and medical records to the Trump administration as part of a criminal investigation.

A lawsuit filed against Lucile Packard Children’s Hospital at Stanford seeks to block the hospital from complying with a U.S. Department of Justice criminal subpoena seeking the information.

“My greatest fear is that the government could try to take my child away from me because I supported his care,” the mother of a 17-year-old transgender boy from San Mateo County said in a declaration attached to the lawsuit.

They are identified, like all of the parents and patients in the lawsuit, only by initials.

“I am deeply concerned that the government could use my child’s records to target and prosecute us as parents for seeking out medically necessary care for our child,” said another declaration filed last week by the parent of a 15-year-old nonbinary transgender child from Santa Clara County.

The parent said disclosure of the information would make them fear for their family’s safety. They are identified, like all of the parents and patients in the lawsuit, only by initials.

“I am scared of death threats, harassment of my child, and professional consequences for me, including being fired from my job,” C.C. said.

The federal criminal subpoena also seeks the personnel files of staff involved in transgender care, according to the lawsuit.

A second child from Santa Clara County, one from San Francisco and one from Monterey County, along with their parents, and a young woman now living overseas make up the rest of the plaintiffs’ group.

The lawsuit references President Donald Trump’s January 2025 executive order “Protecting Children from Chemical and Surgical Mutilation,” which said the “maiming and sterilizing” of children “must end.”

Justice Department officials initially used administrative, non-criminal subpoenas to get information on transgender care from various health facilities across the U.S., but were shut down by federal district courts, the lawsuit alleged.

The department, in a “campaign to target transgender youth and their medical providers,” sought to “sidestep” court rulings by launching criminal investigations and getting grand juries to issue subpoenas, the lawsuit said.

The Justice Department did not respond to questions, including about the legal basis for criminal investigations of transgender care.

Former federal prosecutor Neama Rahmani said it is “very unusual” for the department to pivot from administrative subpoenas to criminal grand jury subpoenas.

“Usually if you need information that’s very sensitive you would get a search warrant,” said Rahmani, president of West Coast Trial Lawyers.

“The reason they’re not getting a search warrant here is because they probably think a judge is not going to sign off on it. That’s probably why they’re going this back-door route.”

Attached to the lawsuit as an exhibit is a copy of a subpoena released by New York University’s Langone Health, which said it was “one of several institutions that received a grand jury subpoena.” The subpoena to Stanford Children’s Hospital was “substantively identical,” the lawsuit said.

The Langone document demands information for the period of Jan. 1, 2020 through May 5, 2026. The lawsuit said the children and the young woman received transgender care during that time.

Stanford Children’s Hospital on Monday confirmed it had received a subpoena from the same Justice Department office in the Northern District of Texas that sent the Langone subpoena. The hospital declined to comment on the lawsuit, but said it was “complying with all laws, protecting the privacy of the patients we serve and delivering the highest quality care.”

California law protects the right of Californians to obtain transgender health care. Texas is one of about two dozen states to restrict transgender care for minors, and has banned such treatment since September 2023.

While Texas law would not apply to California residents receiving transgender care in California, the Justice Department may be “forum shopping” — pursuing the matter via a Texas office in hopes the court and jury pool would be more favorable than in California, Rahmani said.

Rahmani noted that the subpoena demanded records of billing, treatment codes and insurance claims, suggesting the Justice Department may be hunting evidence of fraud.

The Langone subpoena’s demands include “complete personnel files” for all employees providing transgender care, along with their supervisors and subordinates. Also sought are documents related to parental authorization of treatment, and “documents sufficient to identify each patient.”

In a section addressing the nation’s medical-privacy law, the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act known as HIPAA, the subpoena said that in the interest of “a legitimate law enforcement inquiry,” information without people’s identities “could not reasonably be used.”

The patients and parents argue in the lawsuit that Stanford Children’s Hospital is bound by HIPAA to protect the information from federal law enforcement officials, and that their data falls under the Constitutional right to keep personal matters out of government view.

HIPAA would allow Stanford Children’s Hospital to hand over the information to the Justice Department if hospital officials determined that certain conditions were met, related in part to the scope of information sought and the legitimacy of the law enforcement purpose for obtaining it, said Maya Bernstein, former senior adviser for privacy policy in the office of the U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services.

But the hospital could also decline to provide the information without a court order, Bernstein said. Hospital officials would have to consider ethical obligations, California law, the facility’s reputation, the need to guarantee privacy so people would not be afraid to obtain transgender care, and the prospect of lawsuits by patients should the information be exposed to federal authorities, Bernstein said.

The subpoena puts the hospital “between a rock and a hard place,” Bernstein said. “No entity wants to be uncooperative with law enforcement at the outset, but they have all the other things to consider.”