DOJ served a sealed grand jury subpoena on Lucile Packard Children's Hospital seeking transgender minors' medical records

On May 7, 2026, the U.S. Department of Justice served a grand jury subpoena, issued under seal, on Lucile Packard Children's Hospital at Stanford, demanding records that would identify every patient who received gender-affirming care as a minor. For each patient, the subpoena sought all records relating to clinical assessments, diagnoses, and treatment "from initial consultation to the most recent treatment provided," along with intake forms and parent or guardian authorizations, with a return date of June 10 and no restrictions on how the government could use or share the files.

Prosecutors obtained the subpoena through a grand jury in the Northern District of Texas — a venue more than 1,500 miles from the hospital, with no apparent connection to Stanford, the California families whose records were sought, or the medical care at issue. The demand followed a year of unsuccessful efforts to obtain the same categories of records through administrative subpoenas: at least eight federal district judges had quashed those earlier demands, with one court calling the government's stated justification a "smokescreen" and another finding that the department "issued the subpoena first and searched for a justification second." Rather than accept those rulings, the department repackaged the identical demands as a grand jury subpoena and served it without notice to the affected patients or their parents.

The subpoena was one of a series of nearly identical demands served on hospitals around the country as part of a Justice Department effort to obtain the medical records of transgender youth, following the department's earlier criminal subpoena to NYU Langone Health.

Updates

2026-05-27 — California families sued to block the subpoena [1, 2]

Six California families, whose transgender children received care at Stanford, filed suit in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California (Z.A. v. Lucile Salter Packard Children's Hospital at Stanford), asking the court to bar disclosure of their children's records on informational-privacy, equal-protection, and Fourth Amendment grounds.

2026-06-12 — Federal judge barred DOJ from obtaining the records [5]

A federal judge in California barred the Justice Department from requesting, receiving, or otherwise obtaining records identifying Packard patients who sought or received gender-affirming care while the litigation proceeded.

2026-07-02 — Court issued preliminary injunction finding a likely Fifth Amendment violation [6]

U.S. District Judge P. Casey Pitts directed Packard not to produce additional records and barred the government from further enforcement while motions are pending, finding the demands likely violate the Fifth Amendment.