Imagine learning that the U.S. Department of Justice wants your child’s medical file. Not a summary. The whole record: your child’s name, their diagnosis, the notes from every appointment, the consent forms you signed as a parent. And imagine learning that the demand came not through any process you could see or answer, but through a sealed grand jury subpoena issued in Texas, a state your family has never lived in, for an investigation the government refuses to describe.

That is what happened to the families in this case. Their children received medical care at Lucile Packard Children’s Hospital at Stanford. In July 2025, the Justice Department demanded the hospital’s records on transgender patients through an administrative subpoena. When courts around the country began rejecting those subpoenas, DOJ changed tactics. In May 2026, it withdrew its demand to Stanford and, the next day, served a nearly identical one, this time issued in secret by a federal grand jury in the Northern District of Texas. The government told the families that if they objected, their only option was to go argue in Texas, where the grand jury’s purpose and what use DOJ planned for their records would remain sealed.

Nothing like this has happened before. The federal government has never used the secret criminal process to sweep up the identities and medical histories of children, nationwide, because of the kind of care they received. The families in this case did nothing but take their kids to the doctor. The care was lawful in California. It was recommended by their physicians. And now the government wants a list of who received it, with no limit on what it may do with that list.

The stakes for these families are hard to overstate. Once a child’s name and diagnosis are in a federal database, they cannot be taken back. Parents fear being investigated, or losing custody, for following medical advice. Young people fear being outed to the government before they have told anyone else. Doctors fear that providing standard care will put their patients in a prosecutor’s file. And every family in the country with a transgender child is watching to see whether the government can do this.

The National Center for LGBTQ Rights, GLAD Law, and Rosen Bien Galvan & Grunfeld LLP filed this case on May 27, 2026, on behalf of six families, asking the court to stop the records from being turned over. We argue that the demand violates the families’ constitutional right to privacy in their medical information and their First Amendment rights, and that federal health privacy law does not permit this kind of dragnet.

Where the case stands

• June 2026: The U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California issued an emergency order blocking production of the records, one day before DOJ’s deadline. 

• July 2, 2026: Judge P. Casey Pitts granted a preliminary injunction barring DOJ and Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche from obtaining the records by any means while the case proceeds. The court also certified a class of every patient who received this care at Stanford as a minor between January 1, 2020 and May 5, 2026, so the protection extends to all of them, not just the families who sued. 

• Now: The government has appealed to the Ninth Circuit. The records remain protected.