In July 2025, Trump’s Department of Justice served sweeping administrative subpoenas on more than 20 hospitals and clinics across the country that provide gender-affirming care to transgender young people. The subpoenas demanded, among other things, the names, Social Security Numbers, addresses, diagnoses, clinical histories, and familial information of all patients under age 18 who had been prescribed puberty blockers or hormone therapy over the preceding five years.
One of the providers, Rhode Island Hospital, explained to the DOJ that it could not comply with the requests by the government’s August 7 deadline. And at first, the DOJ appeared to agree: The hospital and the government started negotiating the subpoena’s scope, and the government indicated that partial compliance would be sufficient in the interim. But in February 2026, after months of regular communication, the DOJ went radio silent.
Twelve weeks later, on April 28, the government emailed Rhode Island Hospital and asked to schedule a “conference this week regarding status.” The hospital replied on April 29, proposing a conference date. Yet on April 30, rather than conferring with the hospital as requested, the DOJ filed a petition to enforce the subpoena—in a federal district court in Texas. The filing contended that the DOJ had subpoenaed Rhode Island Hospital as part of an investigation it was conducting in the Northern District of Texas, and that the hospital had failed to comply with the DOJ’s “reasonable” demands for “over ten months.” That same day, before the hospital had a chance to respond, Chief District Judge Reed O’Connor granted the petition, and ordered the hospital to “provide all records responsive to each request in the subpoena within 14 days.”
Shortly thereafter, the Rhode Island agency responsible for the welfare of children in state custody got wind of O’Connor’s order and filed an emergency motion in federal district court in Rhode Island to quash the subpoena. And on May 13, Judge Mary McElroy indeed invalidated it, concluding that the administration’s requests for “intimate medical details” from “one of this country’s most vulnerable populations” constituted “a drastic overreach of its investigative authority.”
McElroy’s order prohibited the DOJ from “receiving, using, retaining, or disseminating any patient-identifying information or protected health information” that Rhode Island Hospital had already produced in response to the subpoena. And she sharply criticized the DOJ for engaging in “subterfuge” and showing an “appalling” disregard of its duty of candor—including making several representations to the hospital, to her court, and to O’Connor’s court that, McElroy said, were “deceptive” if not “utterly false.”
McElroy’s order created a problem for the Trump administration’s ability to implement its anti-trans agenda. So, on May 18, O’Connor came up with an innovative solution: He ordered the hospital to “turn over all responsive documents” to him, personally, by the end of the day on May 19. O’Connor claimed his directive was “necessary” because of the hospital’s “flagrant attempts to avoid compliance with lawful orders.” And he pinky-promised that the documents will be held privately by the court and “not available to the Government.”
O’Connor further ordered Rhode Island Hospital not to return to McElroy’s courtroom for help—or to seek relief from any other court, for that matter, apart from his, the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, or the U.S. Supreme Court. And, for good measure, O’Connor prohibited the hospital from “aiding and abetting” or “encouraging” anyone else to seek relief “from any other court but those identified above.” One of the attorneys on the case told the Boston Globe that they had “never seen an order like this.”
The Rhode Island government agency immediately asked the First Circuit for an order that would prohibit the hospital from handing over the records to anyone. But a three-judge panel, including two Biden-appointed judges, denied that request. As a result, O’Connor’s staggering abuse of power appears to have paid off: According to a notice O’Connor published on May 19, at least some of the requested information about patients at Rhode Island Hospital is now in his personal possession. And more information is on the way.
It would be hard to find a case that better illustrates the absurdities of judge-shopping, a practice where litigants file cases in a district with the aim of getting a particular judge who they think will be friendly to their cause. Here, the Trump administration opened an investigation in Washington, D.C., and issued a subpoena pursuant to that investigation on a hospital in Rhode Island, yet it filed a petition to enforce the subpoena in Texas. O’Connor’s chambers in Fort Worth are nearly 1,800 miles away from Rhode Island Hospital and the patients whose privacy he is violating.
The only reason why the DOJ would go to Texas is because O’Connor has cultivated a reputation as one of the far-right’s most dependable judicial activists, whose greatest hits include rulings against the Affordable Care Act, family leave benefits for same-sex couples, and bathroom access for transgender students. In her May 13 order, McElroy said it was “obvious” that the DOJ was trying to shield its investigative tactics from her court’s review “in favor of a distant forum that DOJ deems friendly to its political positions.”
Judge-shopping is a familiar problem that courts and Congress have yet to rein in. O’Connor even gave a speech in 2024—which McElroy flagged in a footnote in her order—in which he described the Biden Justice Department as a “frequent forum shopper.” Notably, O’Connor gave that speech a few months after the federal judiciary’s policymaking body proposed recommendations to limit judge-shopping; his district declined to adopt them.
It’s not surprising that Trump’s DOJ would put O’Connor on their shopping list. What’s galling, however, is how eager O’Connor is to be bought. His order compels compliance with a subpoena that McElroy already determined was illegal. In fact, at least eight federal courts to date have quashed or limited identical subpoenas that Trump’s DOJ served on other hospitals, having determined they were issued for “an improper purpose” and “in bad faith.”
Since his first day back in office, Trump has waged a tireless assault against the legal rights and human dignity of trans people. His administration has threatened to suspend federal funds to hospitals that provide gender-affirming care to trans kids, and celebrated when those hospitals stopped providing it. In an April 2025 memo launching the investigation that led to these subpoenas, then-Attorney General Pam Bondi called the very existence of trans teenagers “tragic and absurd,” and she excoriated doctors who provide gender-affirming care for failing to “serve as a bulwark against this sociological disease.”
The DOJ’s subpoenas are just the latest aspect of the Trump administration’s attacks on transgender people. Judges like McElroy have broadly agreed that the DOJ is not allowed to bully trans kids. O’Connor volunteered to bully trans kids in the DOJ’s stead.
