Leave trans kids ALONE!
By Alexander Castro, Rhode Island Current
The federal appeal is the latest volley in a back-and-forth court saga with a cache of sensitive medical records at its core, namely six years of patient information from minors prescribed puberty blockers or hormone therapy via Rhode Island Hospital providers.
The court fight — whose genesis lies in DOJ’s July 2025 maneuvering to obtain these records via an administrative subpoena — has now spanned two U.S. District Courts and two Courts of Appeals.
The DOJ filed its notice of appeal with the 1st U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Boston, aiming to undo U.S. District Court Judge Mary McElroy’s decision in the case first brought to her court on May 4 by Rhode Island’s Office of Child Advocate.
Child Advocate Katelyn Medeiros is tasked with legal representation and advocacy for children in state care, an unspecified number of whom would be affected by the desired records’ disclosure. Her office moved to have Rhode Island’s own federal court nullify the DOJ subpoena that would have forced the hospital to turn over medical records by Thursday — a deadline set per the order of a judge in U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Texas, where the DOJ sought, and obtained, an order to enforce the subpoena on April 30.
McElroy granted the child advocate’s petition and impugned the federal prosecutors for their conduct during an in-person hearing on Tuesday and their claims made in court documents. McElroy wrote that DOJ “has misrepresented and withheld information” to not only her court, but to the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Texas.
“It did so in an obvious effort to shield its recent investigative tactics — previously rejected by every other court to review them — from this Court’s review, in favor of a distant forum that DOJ deems friendly to its political positions,” McElroy wrote.
Seven other federal courts have deemed comparable subpoenas were issued “for an improper purpose,” McElroy wrote.
“The Administration has publicly characterized gender-affirming care for minors as abuse, directed the DOJ to bring its practice to an end, and celebrated when hospitals curtailed such programs as a result of this subpoena campaign,” the judge wrote.
Cheers, jeers and a clarification
The DOJ did not immediately respond to requests for comment Thursday, but spokesperson Natalie Baldassarre told the Boston Globe via email the same day, “The Rhode Island court’s attack on the professionalism and integrity of DOJ attorneys is outrageous and unjustified. We are appealing, and our investigations continue.”
The feds were not the only party busy filing follow-ups on Thursday after McElroy’s ruling.
An unsigned statement sent Thursday from a spokesperson for Brown University Health, the healthcare network to which Rhode Island Hospital belongs, noted, “We agree with the judge’s ruling, and the facts recited in it.”
But the hospital — which intervened in the child advocate’s case before Tuesday’s hearing, and made its own case in court — asked McElroy for clarification on her order Thursday.
The hospital feared that the injunction in McElroy’s original ruling “could be read to be narrower than the fulsome relief” the judge intended.
“And of course, RIH fully expects that the DOJ will try to use any ambiguity, however tenuous, to its advantage,” the hospital’s attorneys wrote.
McElroy on Thursday amended the order to sharpen her injunction to prevent DOJ from “seeking, receiving, using, retaining, or disseminating” any patient-identifying or protected medical information, especially from any of the five patient-level data categories which provoked the Rhode Island court battle. DOJ had asked for 15 categories of data in all. Her order on Wednesday did not include the term “seeking.”
Meanwhile, filings in the Northern Texas case — for which the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals’ denied the hospital’s request for a stay on Tuesday, during McElroy’s bench hearing — continue.
DOJ notified the Texas court of McElroy’s ruling and amendment on Thursday, and the court also unsealed a May 12 order explaining why U.S. Chief Judge Reed O’Connor had stopped DOJ from providing additional sealed information to Rhode Island Hospital.
“The Rhode Island court has not indicated what, if any, protections these documents would receive,” O’Connor wrote in his now-unsealed May 12 order. “Further, it is not clear why this sealed or protected information should be provided to Rhode Island Hospital when this Court has determined it should not be provided.”
The child advocate’s filing came a few days after April 30, when the DOJ petitioned the Northern Texas court to enforce the hospital’s production of the documents. O’Connor issued the order the same day.
McElroy could not directly invalidate another federal judge’s order. But since the subpoena was issued administratively — in other words, by the DOJ and not a judge — McElroy could, as she suggested during Tuesday’s hearing, smash it directly.
McElroy’s judgment additionally enjoins, or prohibits, the federal government “from seeking, receiving, using, retaining, or disseminating any patient-identifying information or protected health information” the hospital could produce in response to the subpoena.
Child Advocate Medeiros praised the ruling in a statement Thursday morning: “The protections safeguarding these records exist to preserve trust, confidentiality, and the highest standard of care for every child, and defending them is essential to ensuring that no child’s future is harmed by unlawful disclosure,” she wrote.
“No child or family should ever have to fear that the most intimate details of their lives are subject to unnecessary exposure by the federal government when seeking medical care,” Medeiros added.
Tensions with feds continue
McElroy’s 24-page order — newly revised and re-filed Thursday to incorporate the slightly expanded injunction — suggests the antagonistic bond between the DOJ and Rhode Island’s federal courthouse may not abate any time soon.
McElroy recounted the scene in court Tuesday, which she described as one in which the DOJ’s “senior attorney — who was present at many of the events that took place in this case — sat silently by as his counterpart, a junior attorney who has been practicing law for approximately six months and had no relevant information, was forced to answer questions about DOJ’s blatant disregard for the proper course of negotiations.”
McElroy reserved a special rancor for Lisa K. Hsiao, acting director of the DOJ’s Enforcement and Affirmative Litigation Branch, who had written under oath that Rhode Island Hospital had not communicated with DOJ since February 2026.
Court documents showed that, in fact, the two parties had emailed days before the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Texas approved the department’s petition to enforce the subpoena.
“This reckless disregard for the duty of candor owed to a federal court is appalling,” McElroy wrote.
Kevin Love Hubbard, an attorney with the Lawyers’ Committee of RI who represented the Child Advocate in court, was previously on the other side of the courtroom, having been former chief of the DOJ’s Civil Division in the Rhode Island U.S. Attorney’s office.
Before the routine turnover that happens in U.S. Attorneys’ offices with a change in presidential administration, Hubbard was still working for the DOJ roughly 10 months ago, around the same time DOJ was sending out subpoenas.
Has Hubbard’s previous employer undergone an internal change since his departure?
“That’s fair to say,” he told reporters outside court on Tuesday.
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