The Department of Justice is targeting a Texas whistleblower who exposed Texas Children’s Hospital secretly performing attempted gender-transition procedures on children.

The U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of Texas announced Monday that it had indicted 34-year-old Eithan Haim for “obtaining protected individual health information for patients that were not under his care and without authorization.”

If convicted, he faces up to 10 years in prison and a $250,000 maximum possible fine.

Texas Children’s had publicly said in March 2022 that it would no longer perform attempted gender-transition procedures on kids. In May 2023, Haim provided journalist Christopher Rufo with documents showing that Texas Children’s was “lying to the public about the existence of its transgender-medicine program,” as Haim later revealed in an explosive January 2024 piece.

“I worked at the hospital as a surgery resident, and I knew that these interventions didn’t stop,” Haim wrote. “Three days after the announcement, a surgeon implanted a hormone device in a healthy 11-year-old girl for gender dysphoria. Over the next year, the frequency of these procedures increased, and potentially hundreds more children received hormone interventions for gender dysphoria.”

“Meantime, the director of a program that supposedly no longer existed was given the opportunity to speak at the hospital’s most prestigious lecture series in January 2023,” he continued. “I knew that it was my moral responsibility to expose what was happening to these children.”

Haim told The Free Press that before he gave Rufo any of the documents, he made sure that the patient’s names and identifying information were redacted (to protect himself from violating HIPAA and to protect the patients’ privacy).

The very next day after Rufo published Haim’s (then anonymous) May 2023 expose, the Texas Legislature banned these experimental gender-transition attempts for minors.

A month later, two federal agents came to Haim’s home to speak with him. They told him that he was a “potential target” of an investigation into federal criminal violations related to medical records.

“It was clear to me that this was a political investigation; I refused to submit to an interview without an attorney,” he wrote in City Journal.

After this, Haim went public with his story.

“To these agents, the prosecutor, and their political handlers, I was a criminal because I had told the truth,” he wrote. “It didn’t matter that we exposed the fact that the largest children’s hospital in the world was lying to the public about the existence of a program in which children were manipulated, mutilated, and even sterilized. It didn’t matter that the practice that they were lying about had now become illegal. It didn’t matter that I had committed no crime.”

“None of this mattered, I believe, because I had exposed a truth that threatened their ideology,” Haim added. “This was the reason for their frightening show of force. The intent was to intimidate me. If I agreed to stay silent, though, I would be legitimizing their lies and sacrificing the truth. Instead, I decided to fight back.”

Haim is now set to make his initial appearance before U.S. Magistrate Yvonne Y. Ho in Houston, Texas.

“The four-count indictment alleges Haim obtained personal information including patient names, treatment codes and the attending physician from Texas Children’s Hospital’s (TCH) electronic system without authorization,” says the U.S. Attorney’s Office release. “He allegedly obtained this information under false pretenses and with intent to cause malicious harm to TCH.”

Texas Children’s did not immediately respond to requests for comment from The Daily Signal.

Haim joined “The Daily Signal Podcast” in March to share his story.

“What’s going to happen now is we’re going to do everything we can, [with] every fiber of my being, to hold them accountable,” Haim told The Daily Signal at the time. “We’re never going to stop until we succeed. So they thought they were going to intimidate me. They thought I was going to bend the knee to their evil ideology, like most doctors would have done. But as they were coming to find out, they had knocked on the wrong door.”

Haim is one of a number of Americans who have faced DOJ charges related to hot-button culture war issues. Armed FBI agents arrested Mark Houck, a Catholic father of seven and pro-life activist, in front of his children over an incident outside an abortion clinic that had been dismissed by local authorities.