The sentence is doing the heavy lifting for the whole segment. Minnesota, Megyn Kelly said, was declared by Gov. Tim Walz 'a refuge for so-called trans kids from other states seeking gender surgery over their parents' objections' [1].
Minnesota HF 146, passed in 2023, amended the Uniform Child Custody Jurisdiction and Enforcement Act. That is a jurisdiction statute - it governs which state's court hears a custody dispute.
Per the Minnesota House's own summary, it does three things: gives Minnesota courts jurisdiction where a child is present in Minnesota to obtain gender-affirming care; prohibits enforcement of a court order from another state removing a child from parents for receiving such care; and bars arrest warrants sought by other states [2].
Read the second one again. The protected party is the parent. The fact pattern the law is built for is a child in Minnesota with a consenting parent, and another state trying to remove that child from that parent. It runs in the opposite direction from the claim.
The statutory text does contain a gender-care hook, and honesty requires saying so. Minn. Stat. 518D.204 lists 'the child has been unable to obtain gender-affirming health care' among the grounds for temporary emergency jurisdiction, and critics called that provision loose [3].
Temporary emergency jurisdiction is the power to hear a case, and subsection (b) makes any resulting order temporary until the home state acts [3]. Jurisdiction to hear a custody case is not authority to order a surgery.
This has been checked before. PolitiFact rated the identical claim False when JD Vance made it in 2024, finding the law 'would neither take away a parent's custody rights, nor would it authorize the government to take custody of a child just because a parent objects to gender-affirming care' [4]. A family-law expert quoted there: 'There's nothing there that says the court has to decide one way or the other. It would apply the ordinary custody standards at that point' [4].
