Late last night, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit denied the Rhode Island Child Advocate’s emergency motion to prevent Rhode Island Hospital from being forced to transfer children’s medical records to a federal court in Texas. The motion sought a court order barring Rhode Island Hospital (RIH) from turning over to the Texas court the sensitive private medical records of minor patients who have received treatment for gender dysphoria at the hospital.
However, the records that RIH will be providing to the Texas court will be anonymized and de-identified. Those anonymized records will be held by the Texas court, secured in a safe and accessible only by court authorization, and the U.S. Department of Justice remains barred from receiving or reviewing the records while appeals play out in the Courts of Appeals for both the First and Fifth Circuits. Because of these limitations, the First Circuit found that there was no irreparable injury for the patients, and therefore declined to issue an emergency injunction.
The Child Advocate, and the advocacy organizations representing the state official, released the following statement today in response to the court ruling:
While we are disappointed in this result, this decision is not the end of our fight to protect Rhode Island children’s medical privacy. We know that even if the DOJ is not receiving these records now, the uncertainty generated by this ongoing legal battle has been harmful. We will do everything in our power to protect the privacy, dignity, and constitutional rights of the children in our state.
While the government has appealed to the First Circuit, the District of Rhode Island’s order quashing the subpoena and enjoining DOJ from receiving any patient-identifying information or protected health information remains in full force. Once the government files a brief with the First Circuit, the Child Advocate will respond and argue that the decision to quash was correctly decided. While the appeal is pending, the government will not be able to access any records RIH produces to the Texas court.
The emergency motion, filed by attorneys for the Lawyers’ Committee for Rhode Island, Democracy Forward, and the American Civil Liberties Union of Rhode Island, was in response to the actions by a federal judge in Texas, who ordered RIH to turn over the records despite a Rhode Island federal judge’s court order last week quashing the subpoena and barring the federal government from obtaining the extremely sensitive documents. The Texas court ordered RIH to turn over the records yesterday and barred the hospital from seeking relief in any other court, including Rhode Island.
In the motion that the Child Advocate first filed in the case earlier this month, she called the subpoena an “unprecedented intrusion into the private medical information of children, many of whom are among the most vulnerable in our state’s care,” and that “DOJ issued the Subpoena as part of a coordinated campaign by the Trump Administration to eliminate access to medical care for gender dysphoria – lifesaving care that is recognized as medically necessary by every major medical association – even where it is expressly protected by state law, as it is in Rhode Island.”
A copy of the appellate court decision and other information about the case can be found here.