President Donald Trump’s Department of Justice has dropped a case brought by the Biden administration against a doctor who leaked that a Houston hospital was performing transgender surgeries on minors.
U.S. District Judge David Hittner accepted prosecutors’ request to get rid of the four felony counts against Dr. Eithan Haim, 34, who was accused of accessing patient records from Texas Children’s Hospital under false pretenses, The New York Post reported.
The doctor gave the records to conservative journalist Christopher Rufo in 2023.
“Last spring, executives at Texas Children’s Hospital announced that they would cease performing transgender medical procedures on children, citing potential legal and criminal liability. The hospital’s chief pediatrician, Catherine Gordon, an advocate for ‘gender-affirming therapy,’ abruptly resigned,” Rufo said in his story for City Journal.
“I have obtained exclusive whistleblower documents showing that, despite its public statements, the Houston-based children’s hospital—the largest in the United States—has secretly continued to perform transgender medical interventions, including the use of implantable puberty blockers, on minor children. (When reached via email, hospital spokeswoman Kelley Carville responded: ‘We have no comment.’),” he said in the report.
The doctor’s trial was set to begin on February 10, and prosecutors did not offer a reason for why they wanted to drop the charges.
But Haim’s team celebrated the decision and said that their client was “vindicated.”
“The United States has finally agreed to drop the case against Dr. Haim, and the Court just granted dismissal,” defense attorney Marcella Burke said.
“The fight against the evils he exposed continues, but this dismissal represents a repudiation of the weaponization of federal law enforcement and the first step in accountability for the misdeeds we have all witnessed in this case,” she added.
The decision to drop the case is one of many changes to former President Joe Biden’s administration’s policies since President Donald Trump was inaugurated less than a week ago.
The new administration is moving to mass deport migrants who were allowed into the nation temporarily under Biden administration parole programs.
In a memo signed on Thursday by the acting head of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, officials were given instructions on how to use powers to quickly deport the migrants that were previously given only for encounters at the southern border in certain circumstances under the Biden-Harris regime, The New York Times reported.
It also seems to provide officials with the authority to expel migrants from two significant Biden-era programs that have permitted over a million people to enter the country temporarily.
“Those programs — an app called CBP One that migrants could use to try to schedule appointments to enter the United States, and an initiative that let in certain migrants fleeing Cuba, Nicaragua, Venezuela and Haiti — were key pillars of the Biden administration’s efforts to discourage illegal entries by allowing certain legal pathways. Immigrant advocates also worried that the memo could apply to Afghan and Ukrainian immigrants brought to the United States under separate programs,” the report said.
“The decision indicates that President Trump will try to use every facet of the immigration enforcement apparatus to crack down on a system he has long said has been abused, and that he intends to target not just those who sneaked across the border but even those who followed previously authorized pathways to enter,” the Times added.
The migrants, who are often from dangerous nations, were granted a two-year period known as “parole” to stay in the United States legally, but the memo appears to allow for them to be deported sooner if not immediately.
Republicans have criticized the two Biden programs, likening them to a quasi-legal way to facilitate illegal immigration as approximately 1.4 million migrants utilized these programs to enter the country under Biden’s watch.
