The Supreme Court agreed Friday to take up the constitutionality of geofence warrants — broad search orders that compel technology companies to produce the location history of every cellphone user within a defined geographic area during a specific time period. The justices’ decision to hear the case sets the stage for a ruling on the Fourth Amendment limits of a surveillance technique that law enforcement agencies have adopted as a routine investigative tool.
The case centers on a warrant that suburban Richmond, Virginia, police served on Google in their investigation of a 2019 bank robbery. It arrives at the court as two federal appeals courts have reached conflicting conclusions on whether the warrants amount to an unconstitutional dragnet search.
The Chatrie case
Police used location data obtained through the warrant to identify and arrest Okello Chatrie in connection with the robbery of the Call Federal Credit Union in Midlothian, Virginia. Chatrie eventually pleaded guilty and was sentenced to nearly 12 years in prison.
Chatrie’s lawyers challenged the warrant as a violation of his privacy, arguing that it allowed authorities to gather the location history of people near the bank without any evidence those individuals had a connection to the robbery. Prosecutors countered that Chatrie had no reasonable expectation of privacy because he had voluntarily opted into Google’s Location History service.
A federal district judge agreed that the search violated Chatrie’s Fourth Amendment rights but still admitted the evidence at trial, finding that the officer who obtained the warrant had reasonably believed he was acting lawfully — a principle courts have called the good-faith exception.
A divided appeals court landscape
The federal appeals court covering Virginia and surrounding states upheld Chatrie’s conviction, though the ruling was fractured, with judges divided on their reasoning. In a separate case, the federal appeals court based in New Orleans reached the opposite conclusion, ruling that geofence warrants violate the Fourth Amendment’s prohibition on unreasonable searches. The conflict between the two circuits is the type of legal disagreement that typically prompts the Supreme Court to intervene and establish a uniform national standard.
Geofence warrants have become an increasingly common investigative tool for law enforcement. Because they capture the movements of all people in a given location — not just identified suspects — they sweep in data on individuals who have no connection to the crime under investigation.
The case is expected to be argued before the justices later in 2026, either during the current term’s spring session or at the start of the court’s next term in October.