Jamelah Zidan is a US correspondent for JURIST and a law student at Vermont Law and Graduate School.
On May 12th NYU Langone Healtha large hospital network in New York state, announced that it had received a federal application Grand Jury Subpoena by prosecutors in the state of Texas. The subpoena will request the names of all patients under the age of 18 who received the subpoena gender-equitable care at NYU Langone hospitals since 2020, as well as all providers, administrators and volunteers involved in their care. The public only learned of the subpoena through NYU Langone, citing New York Shield lawwarned families that Texas prosecutors could obtain their private records within 30 days.
The subpoena in Texas is comprehensive. It requires complete personnel files of all employees involved in these cases – whether providing care, billing or supervisory staff – as well as copies of all internal rules, training materials and billing-related emails. Most strikingly, information is required to identify each patient and their entire medical history, from the first visit to the last treatment. However, it is never specified what crime is being investigated or what law was allegedly broken.
The subpoena focuses on a term the government has used in its legal actions since 2025: “gender rejection procedure.” US Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy formalized The term was released in a Dec. 18 statement that said gender-affirming care “does not meet professionally accepted standards of health care delivery” — a finding that has authorized federal officials to exclude health care providers from the government’s Medicare and Medicaid programs. U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) General Counsel Mike Stuart then threatened to publicly refer at least 17 children’s hospitals to federal investigators for debarment, including NYU Langone, citing “sex refusal procedures” each time. The term has now become criminal Summons as a basic legal definition, explicitly overriding medical terminology and potentially recasting standard billing practices as evidence of fraud.
Courts have rejected this formulation. In Oregon v. Kennedy, Justice Kasubhai completely gutted the Kennedy Declaration and refused to use the government’s terminology, writing, “In this Court, all persons are treated with dignity. The Court will use the appropriate term ‘gender-affirming care.’ The government’s own HHS report In pediatric gender care, which serves as the stated scientific basis for these measures, the term “sex rejection” is not used once.
This subpoena to NYU Langone comes at a time when legal challenges are increasing. Last week, eleven families, represented by GLAD Law (GLBTQ Legal Advocates & Defenders), the National Center for LGBTQ Rights and Brown, Goldstein & Levy, filed a motion suit in the USA District Court for the District of Marylandrequesting nationwide emergency aid to block the US Ministry of Justice (DOJ) from obtaining or retaining patient records pending trial. The filing argues that “once the medical records are turned over to the federal government, the damage becomes irreversible, even if courts later determine that the subpoenas were unlawful.”
In announce In the lawsuit, Brown, Goldstein & Levy attorney Eve Hill said: “History has shown what happens when the government collects lists of members of groups it disadvantages. We cannot allow this history to repeat itself.” This comparison is not rhetorical. Perhaps most concerning are not only the legal mechanics of this subpoena, but also what history tells us about where such list-making leads.
Even before the National Socialists came to power, police throughout Germany had kept lists of suspected homosexuals for years. In the fall of 1934 the Gestapo directed local police forces to send these lists to Berlin, centralizing – for the first time – a nationwide registry of men suspected of engaging in same-sex conduct. These lists were called “Pink lists.” They were used to identify, arrest and deport gay men to concentration camps. The Japanese American internment in 1942 followed a similar pattern: Federal authorities had spent years compiling it Lists before Executive Order 9066 authorized mass incarceration. When the order came, the lists were already ready.
At least seven federal courts have resisted the civil subpoena campaign, but none more directly than U.S. District Judge Mary S. McElroy. Their May 13 order quashing Rhode Island’s subpoena concluded that the DOJ was “unworthy of trust”; the affidavit from a senior Justice Department official was “clearly misleading, if not outright false”; The government had engaged in “deception” to obtain a Texas warrant while keeping its tactics secret from its court. and the subpoena itself lacked any purpose authorized by Congress. As McElroy wrote, “The off-label prescribing behavior that forms the core of DOJ’s theory is not illegal under the Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act.” The DOJ immediately Appealed to the First Circuit and referred the conflict between its order and the Texas enforcement order to appellate courts.
Currently, the shield law provides protection, but most states lack such laws. Families in these states may not even know whether their children’s records have already been submitted to the government. Lawmakers in states without these protections should act now, not wait for the next subpoena. Hospitals have both the legal right and moral obligation to respond to these subpoenas before releasing records.
NYU Langone has 30 days and the countdown has begun for every hospital that has received a subpoena. All eyes are on the Maryland court. If emergency relief doesn’t arrive before hospitals in vulnerable states comply, it will be too late to wonder what the government will do with these records. The story is clear: The time to protect people is before a list is created, not after it gets into the hands of the government.
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