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"No Borders, No Nations, Just People"

Levi Kalish at HuffPost:

One June afternoon, JD received a phone call from Mount Sinai Health System, informing him that his teenage daughter’s medical records were being requested by the Justice Department, part of a larger criminal probe into the New York medical institution’s program for transgender youth. JD’s 16-year-old daughter Winter was a patient at Mount Sinai’s youth gender center before switching to a different provider in New York City two years ago. (JD, who is also trans, asked that his family only be identified by their first names to protect their privacy.) But still, her medical records — along with those of thousands of other adolescents across the country — were part of the DOJ request, as the Trump administration leveraged an arsenal of federal agencies to try to restrict gender-affirming care for trans youth. “Getting a call like that, it was chilling,” JD told HuffPost. “It felt like intimidation.” Donald Trump and a broad coalition of conservatives have cast transgender identity as both a fiction and a threat — and baselessly claimed that doctors who provide gender-affirming care are carrying out insurance fraud, and only doing so to turn a profit. In Trump’s second term, his administration has exercised unprecedented power to investigate transgender health associations, threatened to pull federal funding from hospitals that provide gender-affirming care to trans minors, and issued a rule to end coverage of such care under the Affordable Care Act.

Then, last summer, the DOJ escalated its tactics when it issued more than 20 civil subpoenas to children’s hospitals in an effort to compel them to turn over six years of data about adolescent gender-affirming care. The data demanded includes insurance billing, diagnostic codes, internal communications between doctors, and even information that could identify each minor patient. But in May, after federal courts blocked the DOJ’s subpoenas, the agency took things one step further: sending criminal subpoenas to hospitals for the same type of information — only now with the threat of criminal charges over their care for trans kids.

The subpoenas have created a legal mess for healthcare providers and an existential crisis for the patients that rely on them. Dozens of hospitals, including Mount Sinai, have stopped providing care for transgender youth, even though many are protected by state laws. Trans youth and their families, meanwhile, have been forced to find other providers or forgo care altogether, and weather the uncertainty of government intrusion into their private medical information. [...]

A Culture Of Fear

Two hospitals in New York City, Mount Sinai and New York University Langone Hospitals, and one in California, Lucile Packard Children’s Hospital at Stanford, have received criminal subpoenas, according to legal filings and disclosures from the hospitals. Both states have what are called “shield” laws, which protect healthcare providers against prosecution simply for providing gender-affirming care. In each instance, the criminal subpoena was issued from the office of a sympathetic federal judge in Texas thousands of miles away: North Texas Chief District Judge Reed O’Connor, who has a history of ruling against LGBTQ+ inclusive policies. Federal judges have largely criticized the DOJ for not clearly articulating the merits, or legitimate legal reasons, for these wide-sweeping subpoenas. At least eight federal district courts have blocked the DOJ’s efforts to obtain sensitive medical information through civil subpoenas — including minor patients’ diagnoses and prescriptions, insurance claims, and communications between healthcare providers. U.S. District Judge Katherine Polk Failla blocked the criminal subpoena into NYU Langone in June, protecting all minor patients receiving gender-affirming care in New York while the case continues. Judge Failla chided the DOJ’s attempts to judge-shop the subpoena to Judge O’Connor for a more favorable outcome, giving him “some undefined role in the…criminal investigation.” The government’s behavior, she said, “rises to the level of the most egregious official conduct.”

[...] So far two hospitals have reached settlements with the DOJ. Texas Children’s Hospital announced in May it will establish the nation’s first clinic for detransitioners, or people who sought gender-affirming care and then wanted to stop or reverse parts of it, and will pay $10 million in penalties over allegations of false insurance billing. Ohio’s Cleveland Clinic agreed to pay $308,000 to resolve similar allegations and pledged to halt transgender care for minors for 20 years. Even those who have pushed back have not always won in court. Rhode Island Hospital, despite challenging a civil subpoena out of Judge O’Connor’s office, was compelled to release medical records to his court in Texas in May of this year.

[...] Do No Harm, a lobbying group founded in 2022, pushes anti-LGBTQ+ legislation and initiates lawsuits against DEI practices in medical schools. Hsiao, the acting director of Enforcement and Affirmative Litigation Branch in the DOJ, specifically cited Do No Harms’ database of children’s hospitals that offer gender-affirming care in her statement within a lawsuit. By aggregating diagnostic codes and insurance data, Do No Harm claims to already know the number of patients that received hormone therapy or puberty blockers, and how much providers have billed insurance companies at more than a dozen hospitals across the country. So far, at least 13 hospitals that have received either grand jury or civil subpoenas from the DOJ also appear on Do No Harm’s list of providers, according to an analysis from HuffPost.

The group has strong ties to both the Trump administration and right-wing money networks. Until a few months ago, Scott Centorino, Do No Harm’s former vice president of policy and programs, was an employee in the Trump administration, working as a special assistant to the White House on domestic policy, according to financial disclosures. Last year the group received $75,000 from The Heritage Foundation, the right-wing policy organization that drafted Project 2025. Do No Harm has also been supported by influential conservative donor Leonard Leo, who has helped Trump shape the current conservative majority on the Supreme Court. Over the last two years, the group’s budget has ballooned from $2 million to $10 million. Stanley Goldfarb, the chairman of Do No Harm, told HuffPost in a statement that the database exists to help policymakers and to “quantify the magnitude of the pediatric gender epidemic.” “Do No Harm and Do No Harm Action are proud to be the leading resources for this administration and lawmakers at the state and federal level who are interested in evidence-based research that supports efforts to eliminate identity politics from the study and practice of medicine,” Goldfarb said through a spokesperson from CRC Advisors, Leo’s public relations and advocacy firm. Do No Harm Action is the organization’s lobbying arm.

Dean Obeidallah at The Dean's Report (07.14.2026):

Today is Bastille Day. That, of course, marks the storming of the Bastille prison in Paris on July 14, 1789—which was the beginning of the French Revolution. But the anger towards King Louis XVI—and his queen, Marie Antoinette—had been simmering for a while before that day. There was the economic pain that people felt—unable to afford food and especially bread. That led to the legendary line attributed to Marie Antoinette, “Let them eat cake.” While she unlikely said those exact words, that still summed up for the people the arrogance of their uncaring leaders.

The people of France were struggling to survive while they saw a King spending lavishly on himself and enriching himself. And then there was King’s cruelty—which was the point. The Bastille prison symbolized the callous tyranny of the French monarch. Political prisoners were often held there—as well as others the King simply want to target for any whim.

That all lit the fuse that led to July 14, 1789, storming of the Bastille prison and the very bloody revolution which followed. This built to August 1792, when the royal couple were arrested. Just six months later—after being convicted of treason—King Louis XVI was publicly beheaded by guillotine on at the Place de la Révolution in Paris (now the Place de la Concorde). Nine months after that, Marie Antoinette was also convicted of treason and on October 16, 1793, she followed her husband to the guillotine. The French Revolution ultimately led to the establishment of a democratic republic where France’s core republican values were cemented of liberty, equality, and fraternity. The parallels to Donald Trump and King Louis XVI are undeniable—as are similarities to any other corrupt, aspiring tyrant. That is what Trump is. We see it with his corruption and excessive spending on ballrooms and an arch to honor himself while people struggle. His king like cruelty. And like with King Louis, there is a and complete callousness that people are suffering higher prices with Trump saying, “I love the inflation” and he doesn’t think about the impact on Americans.

Trump’s fate after his 2020 attempted coup should’ve been at least life in prison—if not worse. Yet here we are with Trump in the White House and openly plotting to rig and steal the 2026 midterm. And he’s not hiding it. Trump has been engaged in a very public, multifaceted campaign to ensure Republicans can rule for “one hundred years.” It all began with Trump’s push for mid-century gerrymandering—something not attempted in the modern era of politics on this level. From there, the corrupt GOP Supreme Court helped Trump’s dream of a one-hundred-year Reich—or rule—by gutting the Voting Rights Act and allowing the GOP in states that had made up the Confederacy erase Black elected officials and dilute the Black vote.

[...] That is why if Trump steals the 2026 election, we can’t look to the Democratic leaders to save us. It’s up to us—just like it was for the French people and the American colonists who 250 years ago this month rose up to challenge a tyrannical king. Sure, some Democratic officials—and even a few Republicans may join us, but we should be leading the charge. We need to make Trump and the GOP aware that if the election is stolen, we will rise up. We will engage in national strikes, we will use civil disobedience and any other means necessary to save our Republic. Perhaps that will deter Trump—the same way the backlash to his $1.8 billion slush fund caused him to reverse course. But if Trump does not fear personal consequences for another coup, he will 100% attempt to steal the 2026 election—as well as 2028. If Trump succeeds at that, then elections will no longer save us. Those are the stakes.

Jim Saksa at Democracy Docket:

The U.S. Postal Service (USPS) confirmed it is following a pair of court orders blocking it from implementing President Donald Trump’s anti-mail voting executive order.  “The Postal Service is abiding by these injunctions, which are also currently under appeal,” Postmaster General David Steiner and Amber McReynolds, chairwoman of the USPS board of governors, wrote Monday in a letter to Senate Democrats obtained by Democracy Docket. The USPS leaders were responding to concerns Democratic senators raised in a letter after Trump issued his executive order in March. That order directed the Postal Service to only deliver mail ballots if states handed over a list of preapproved voters. The senators later reiterated their concerns after USPS published a proposed rule to execute the order in June.  Trump’s directive also mandated USPS to develop secure ballot envelopes with unique barcodes for tracking and utilize them ahead of the 2026 midterm elections. USPS’s letter contends that, even though the agency proposed the rule in response to the executive order, the changes themselves would be “consistent with the Postal Service’s existing — and longstanding — recommended best practices.” 

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