A federal judge in Manhattan on Wednesday ordered the Justice Department to stop seeking sensitive medical information about transgender youth who had received transition-related medical care at New York City hospitals.

The Trump administration had sought to end gender transition treatments for adolescents, asserting that they harm impressionable and vulnerable children. For more than a year, the Justice Department had been investigating hospitals and medical providers that had offered gender transition care to youth. The ruling poses a significant obstacle to those investigations.

In her ruling on Wednesday, delivered in a conference call with attorneys, Judge Katherine Polk Failla of Federal District Court in Manhattan said that she was troubled by the breadth of a grand jury subpoena that had been issued last month to NYU Langone, a major Manhattan health system. The subpoena sought identifying information and medical records about adolescent patients who had received transition care during the past six years.

Those patients, the judge said, had “sought gender affirming treatments under a reasonable assumption of absolute privacy.” She said it was difficult to fathom a reason the government needed the medical information.

“Because I cannot conceive of a crime that would require the breadth of disclosure sought in the subpoena — sensitive medical information for an entire class of people for a six-year period — I have to find that the government’s interest does not outweigh the plaintiffs’ interest in privacy,” Judge Failla said.

If she did not intervene, she said, the consequences could have been severe.

“If not enjoined, the subpoena would allow the government to obtain and disclose the most intimate details of plaintiff’s medical histories and personal lives — in particular their transgender status,” she said.

That could inflict “deep, emotional harm” and undermine trust in doctors and health care institutions, she said.

A Justice Department spokeswoman declined to comment on Judge Failla’s ruling.

Omar Gonzalez-Pagan, a lawyer for Lambda Legal, which had represented the adolescents in the case, described the ruling “as an enormous relief for these families.”

“Using subpoenas to attain the identities and sensitive health information of transgender young people to effectuate such goals should send chills down the spine of every American,” he said.

Judge Failla noted that in oral arguments before her on Tuesday, Justice Department lawyers had been unwilling to provide much assurance about how the requested information would be used. At that hearing, a Justice Department lawyer had pledged that the adolescent patients would not be prosecuted.

“The government views the plaintiffs as the victims in this circumstance,” Luke Miller, the lawyer, said.

But in her opinion, Judge Failla said that she did not place much weight on that assurance and noted that the Justice Department had declined to assure her that the parents of transgender patients would not be prosecuted for their role in their children’s medical care.

Patients who had received transition care at NYU Langone had filed a class-action lawsuit, asking a judge to prevent the Justice Department from obtaining their medical information. In a written order on Wednesday, Judge Failla prohibited the Justice Department on a temporary basis from “seeking, receiving, using” or disseminating any sensitive health information about anyone who had received transition care when they were younger than 18 years old at health care institutions in New York City.

During the past year, the Justice Department and other federal agencies have pursued broad investigations into major hospitals across the United States about gender transition care offered to adolescents.

The investigations are examining whether medical providers may have engaged in fraudulent billing, or wrongly omitted warnings about potential risks to adolescent patients and deceived them with unsubstantiated claims about the effectiveness of puberty blockers and hormone treatments.

Those investigations trace back to White House executive orders issued at the start of President Trump’s current term. One such order, issued by the White House on Jan. 28, 2025, stated that “medical professionals are maiming and sterilizing a growing number of impressionable children under the radical and false claim that adults can change a child’s sex through a series of irreversible medical interventions.” That order instructed federal agencies to prioritize investigations pertaining to transition treatments for adolescents.

Months later, the Justice Department issued a flurry of administrative subpoenas to hospitals seeking information about the gender-related care they provided minors.

Judges have mostly quashed those subpoenas, sometimes ruling that they were issued for an “improper purpose,” such as to harass and intimidate. But the Justice Department appears to have hit upon a new strategy in recent months: relying upon a grand jury investigation.

In May, at least two Manhattan health systems — NYU Langone and Mount Sinai Hospital — received grand jury subpoenas issued out of a federal courthouse in Texas.

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