By Nate Raymond
BOSTON (Reuters) -A federal judge on Tuesday quashed a subpoena the U.S. Department of Justice had issued to Boston Children’s Hospital as part of a wide-ranging investigation into doctors and clinics that provide gender-affirming care to transgender youth.
U.S. District Judge Myong Joun in Boston wrote that the subpoena was too broad and reflected the wider goals of Republican President Donald Trump’s administration, which “has been explicit about its disapproval of the transgender community.”
He said the administration had been clear that it seeks to bring an end to medical providers like Boston Children’s Hospital, one of the nation’s largest pediatric hospitals, providing gender-affirming care to patients.
The real goal of the subpoena, Joun said, was to interfere with Massachusetts’ right to protect gender-affirming care within its borders, to intimidate the hospital to stop providing such care and to dissuade patients from seeking it.
“The Government may be correct that it need not provide probable cause for its investigations, but it cannot use its subpoena power to go on a fishing expedition,” Joun wrote.
Boston Children’s Hospital in a statement welcomed the ruling, “which safeguards the privacy of our patients, their families, and the healthcare professionals who provide their care.”
The Justice Department did not respond to requests for comment.
The ruling appeared to mark the first time a judge had blocked the Justice Department from subpoenaing records as part of a crackdown on providers of medical treatments to transgender minors. The Justice Department has said it sent subpoenas to more than 20 clinics and doctors.
Trump in January issued an executive order directing an end to all federal funding or support for healthcare that aids the transition of transgender youth, calling it a “dangerous trend.”
U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi subsequently in an April memo directed the department to investigate medical providers and pharmaceutical companies that manufacture and distribute puberty blockers and hormones prescribed by doctors “to facilitate a child’s so-called ‘gender transition.'”
Boston Children’s Hospital received its administrative subpoena in June. It challenged the subpoena in court, arguing it was issued for the improper purpose to block a medical treatment legal in Democratic-led Massachusetts.
Joun, an appointee of Democratic former President Joe Biden, agreed, saying the Justice Department was seeking an “astonishingly” broad array of documents “while not offering an iota of suspicion that BCH is actually engaging in fraudulent billing practices or off-label promotion.”
(Reporting by Nate Raymond in Boston; Editing by Richard Chang)
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