In Huge Lawsuit, Six CHLA Families Successfully Prevented The Trump Admin From Obtaining Info Of 3,000 Trans Kids

Legal documents outline the impossible choices faced by families attacked by the Trump regime and stonewalled by CHLA—and how lawyers stepped up to stop them.

CHLA // Wikimedia Commons

When the federal government came knocking, the parents of six young, transgender patients who had received gender-affirming care at Children’s Hospital Los Angeles held the line alongside their lawyers. In doing so, they successfully kept the Trump regime from accessing sensitive medical information, including names, social security numbers, and addresses of over 3,000 transgender children.

The Department of Justice subpoenaed CHLA on June, 2025, court filings reviewed by Erin in the Morning reveal. The documents elucidate the novel ways lawyers and parents are waging legal battles against a hostile federal government; the minefield that parents of and providers for trans youth must constantly navigate; and how, while CHLA may not have handed over the records, they also left patients, parents and providers in the dark about the future of their own health and safety.

Most of all, however, the settlement lawyers achieved in this case help construct a blueprint that activists and advocates can use in other states, too. The Department has sent out more than 20 administrative subpoenas to health care institutions that provide or have provided some form of gender-affirming care to youth, including the Center for Transyouth Health and Development at CHLA.

The DOJ claims these institutions were targeted over supposed “healthcare fraud,” but this is widely seen as a thinly-veiled attempt to intimidate health care institutions serving trans people. A judge in a Massachusetts court struck down a similar subpoena against Boston Children’s Hospital in September 2025, declaring it was “issued for an improper purpose, motivated only by bad faith.”

The lawsuit against the federal government was filed in November on behalf of six families of trans youth patients who have at some point sought gender-affirming care at CHLA. They were represented by Lawyers for Good Government (L4GG), Western Center on Law and Poverty, and Impact Fund.

The subpoena was seemingly unprecedented in its sheer size and scope, but so was the settlement attorneys reached with the government. “This was a first-of-its-kind, historic class action motion to quash a subpoena,” Khadijah M. Silver, Director of Gender Justice and Health Equity at Lawyers for Good Government, told Erin in the Morning.

Class action lawsuits are typically retroactive. Using one to stop government overreach in the form of an investigation in-progress for thousands of people was practically “unheard of.”

”After the Supreme Court’s June decision in Trump v. CASA made it impossible to extend relief to unnamed but similarly-situated parties outside of a class action, we had to think creatively,” Silver said.

“This ruling protects sensitive medical records [and] upholds the professional integrity of providers,” said Western Center’s Executive Director Cori Racela in a press release. “They’re entitled to safety and confidentiality.”

Whether CHLA can or will still have to fork over certain records to the Department of Justice is unclear. But at the very least, the records will be scrubbed of personally identifiable information—for all trans youth treated at CHLA, not just the few whose families went to court.

“Their bravery helps protect all of us from unlawful and discriminatory government intrusion into private health care decisions ” said Lori Rifkin, Litigation Director at Impact Fund.

Erin in the Morning also obtained a copy of the CHLA subpoena, which can be found here. Children’s Hospital Los Angeles did not respond to Erin in the Morning’s request for comment.

CHLA also didn’t respond to requests for comment from their own patients and staff, according to sources that spoke to Erin in the Morning, and according to parent testimonies in court filings.

Every single plaintiff said they had reached out multiple times, but CHLA has never publicly acknowledged they were sent a subpoena, even after the DOJ did.

The subpoena itself reads less like an investigation into supposed fraud and more like a legal “fishing expedition,” lawyers said. That July, CHLA shut down the Transyouth Center; meanwhile, some parents say they prepared to flee the country given the intensifying political attacks on trans youth.

“I worry the government will in fact put me in jail, take my child away, and send my child through the dangerous practice of conversion therapy,” one wrote in court documents.

The subpoena also solicited detailed patient notes from clinicians. “Nothing prevents the DOJ from using patient information to send FBI agents to interview patients, family members, providers and friends,” plaintiffs’ attorneys wrote. “In fact, DOJ has announced its intention to ‘share intelligence’ with state attorneys general and partner with them to ‘build cases against hospitals and practitioners.’”

The fear doesn’t come from nowhere. Trump issued a slate of January executive orders last year targeting trans youth’s care. In an April proclamation for “National Child Abuse Prevention Month,” he decreed that “one of the most prevalent forms of child abuse facing our country today is the sinister threat of gender ideology,” and that supportive parents of transgender children are abusers who ought to be prosecuted.

The Trump regime and other hostile state actors can be arbitrary and haphazard in their enforcement, however. Legal groups emphasize that states, not federal officials, are in charge of child abuse and custody cases.

Nonetheless, families also cited extrajudicial violence from hate groups and extremists. The hospital and others that provide gender-affirming care have already received bomb threats. Before the Transyouth Center shut its doors, anti-trans extremists and hate groups targeted the center’s inaugural medical director and her family, and CHLA had to arrange for her to get a private security detail. Some clinic staff reportedly began wearing body armor to work, as per court filings.

Of the 20 summer subpoenas that went out to gender-affirming care providers, fewer than half of them are publicly known. But in those we do know about, the courts have sided, at least in part, with hospitals, and declared the Department of Justice could not request identifiable information of patients.

In the case of CHLA, it wasn’t just the six families named in the lawsuit who fought back. Another parent, Justine—who asked to use a pseudonym so she wouldn’t out her trans child—was grateful for lawyers’ work and relieved that the DOJ settled, withdrawing the most dangerous aspects of its subpoena. But she still called CHLA “spineless” in the face of the hospital’s capitulation.

“My suspicion is [the DOJ] was like, ‘Well, screw it—none of these kids are getting care there anyway,’” she told Erin in the Morning. “Like, ‘We did what we came to do, which was shut the program down.’”

Justine said that autonomous groups of parents like her organized around the issue. They bombarded patient relations lines, sent form letters informed by other state battles on similar grounds, and pressured the Attorney General of California to take action and uphold state anti-discrimination laws, which should protect trans people’s equal access to health care.

Silver, of Lawyers for Good Government, said the settlement was also likely—at least in part—achieved through the collective action of the legal battles ongoing across the country. Trump’s war on trans kids comes with a literal price tag, as it turns out. Federal lawsuits both on the offensive and defensive are beginning to pile up for the Department of Justice.

“They’re dealing with dwindling resources,” Silver said.