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A federal judge ordered the Trump administration on Friday to restore all articles — including those authored by two Harvard Medical School researchers — to a federal website after they had been removed for including forbidden terms, such as “LGBTQ” and “transgender.”

HMS professors Celeste S. Royce and Gordon D. Schiff sued the Trump administration in March for withdrawing their articles from Patient Safety Network, a federal site which includes patient safety research. The lawsuit argued that the removals violated the researchers’ First Amendment rights and the Administrative Procedure Act, which regulates federal agencies.

Federal District Court Judge Leo T. Sorokin granted a preliminary injunction in a Friday order, writing that the plaintiffs are “likely to succeed” in proving that the removal of their articles was unconstitutional.

“It is difficult to imagine how Drs. Schiff and Royce will not prevail in proving their constitutional claim. They have established—and, during the motion hearing, the defendants conceded—government conduct that constitutes viewpoint discrimination,” Sorokin wrote in an accompanying order detailing the injunction.

The injunction comes just two days after assistant U.S. attorney Shawna H. Yen ’89 conceded at a hearing that the removals constituted “viewpoint discrimination,” a classic violation of the First Amendment. During the hearing, Sorokin seemed skeptical of Yen’s arguments and repeatedly questioned how the take-downs could be constitutional if they discriminated based on the articles’ viewpoints.

The Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality removed the articles in February to comply with a directive from the OPM that instructed the agency to take down “all outward facing media” that “inculcate or promote gender ideology.” The OPM guidance was made in compliance with an earlier executive order from President Donald Trump.

At the hearing, plaintiffs’ attorneys requested that Sorokin order the government to restore all articles removed from PSNet for including banned terms, as well as bar agencies from implementing the OPM’s directive in the future.

In his order, Sorokin did not grant prospective relief, meaning that agencies can still carry out OPM’s directive going forward.

“The plaintiffs have not established any separate, ongoing, irreparable harm—apart from the First Amendment injury already discussed—flowing from the alleged violations of the APA and warranting distinct prospective relief,” Sorokin wrote in the filing.

Sorokin gave the AHRQ, which oversees PSNet, seven days to comply with the injunction.

But it is unclear if the articles can be restored to PSNet. Yen said at Wednesday’s hearing that the official responsible for overseeing AHRQ’s technology would be laid off at the end of June. The website is also no longer publishing new articles and does not have plan to resume publication.

Neither Schiff’s nor Royce’s articles were primarily focused on LGBTQ care, though both included detail about how gay or transgender individuals could be impacted by certain medical conditions.

Schiff’s paper covered suicide risk assessment and noted several “high risk groups,” including LGBTQ people. And Royce’s article briefly explained how endometriosis, a condition where uterine lining-like tissue grows outside the uterus, “can occur in trans and non-gender-conforming people.”

Royce and Schiff’s suit is one of several that Harvard faculty have waged against the Trump administration. A Harvard School of Public Health professor joined a lawsuit over the Trump administration’s freezes on equity-related federal grants. And Harvard’s chapter of the American Association of University Professors has filed two lawsuits — one over the government’s targeting of international affiliates and another over slashes to federal research funding.

Both researchers praised Sorokin’s decision in a press release from the American Civil Liberties Union of Massachusetts, which is representing the two professors.

“As an educator and a physician, I will continue to fight misinformation and falsehoods put out by the administration,” Royce said in the press release. “I will continue to advocate for the rights of my patients and my students.”

—Staff writer William C. Mao can be reached at william.mao@thecrimson.com. Follow him on X @williamcmao.

—Staff writer Veronica H. Paulus can be reached at veronica.paulus@thecrimson.com. Follow her on X @VeronicaHPaulus.