Chatrie and the Geofence Warrant the Supreme Court Just Judged

For the first time, the Supreme Court has held that a geofence warrant — a tool that orders Google to comb its store of location data for every device near a crime scene — implicates the Fourth Amendment. On June 29, 2026, in Chatrie v. United States, No. 25-112, the Court ruled that police conducted a Fourth Amendment search when they acquired Okello Chatrie’s location data from Google, because an individual has a reasonable expectation of privacy in his cell-phone location information. The holding extends the reasoning of Carpenter v. United States into a new and contested context. But the search holding did not end the case: the Court left the question whether this particular warrant was reasonable to the lower court on remand. What follows is commentary and analysis, not legal advice.

How the case reached the Court

In May 2019, the Call Federal Credit Union in Midlothian, Virginia was robbed at gunpoint. With the investigation stalled, police obtained a geofence warrant directing Google to identify devices recorded inside a circle 150 meters in radius centered on the bank during the relevant window. That circle swept in far more than the crime scene — it covered public streets, nearby homes, a hotel, a church, and a restaurant. The data pointed to Okello Chatrie, whose location history placed him at the scene; that lead produced a follow-on warrant for his home and, ultimately, a conviction.

The district court for the Eastern District of Virginia concluded the warrant likely ran afoul of the Fourth Amendment but declined to suppress the evidence, invoking the good-faith exception to the exclusionary rule. On en banc review, the Fourth Circuit affirmed in a one-sentence per curiam order. The fractured reasoning was the tell: the fifteen-judge court split 7–7 on whether a search even occurred, with the chief judge declining to reach the question, yet the judges converged on good faith as the disposition. That posture — deep disagreement on the merits, agreement only on the off-ramp — is what the Supreme Court inherited and, ultimately, what it declined to leave undisturbed.

The constitutional fault line

The doctrinal heart of the dispute was the third-party doctrine and its limits. Under the traditional rule, information voluntarily turned over to a third party carries no reasonable expectation of privacy. The government leaned on that principle: a user enables Location History, the data sits with Google, and querying Google is not searching the user. Chatrie countered that location data is categorically different — sensitive, comprehensive, and revealing of the intimacies of a life — and therefore protected notwithstanding Google’s possession.

That argument drew directly on Carpenter v. United States, 585 U.S. 296 (2018), where the Court held that acquiring historical cell-site location data is a search requiring a warrant, declining to extend the third-party doctrine mechanically to the digital age. The open question was how far Carpenter reaches. A geofence differs in structure from the targeted records there: rather than tracking one known suspect, it begins with a place and time and works backward to whoever was present, requiring Google to scan an enormous user base before anyone is named.

What the argument revealed

The April 27 argument, in hindsight, foreshadowed the divide the eventual lineup would record. Several justices pressed the privacy claim. Justice Gorsuch worried that a ruling for the government could expose cloud-stored emails, photos, and documents to warrantless access on the theory that they, too, sit with a third party. Justice Kagan questioned whether the law should protect only ordinary “patterns of life” while leaving exposed the sensitive instances — attending a political event or visiting a clinic — that a geofence might capture. Justice Sotomayor noted that the trial court had doubted the voluntariness of any consent and that disabling location tracking is, in her words, hard and opaque for ordinary users.

Others were skeptical. Chief Justice Roberts asked why a troubled user would not simply turn the feature off, though he separately voiced concern about geofences trained on churches or political organizations. Justice Alito stressed that enabling Location History takes deliberate steps, and Justice Kavanaugh characterized the detective’s narrowing of the data as good police work. Justice Barrett emphasized that brief movements in public spaces have not traditionally been treated as private. Those threads ran through the opinions the Court issued two months later.

What the Court held

Justice Kagan delivered the opinion of the Court. She was joined by Chief Justice Roberts and Justices Sotomayor, Kavanaugh, and Jackson — a five-Justice majority for the proposition that the government’s acquisition of Chatrie’s Google location data was a search. The reasoning extended Carpenter: just as a person retains a reasonable expectation of privacy in the whole of his physical movements as captured by cell-site records, so too does he retain such an expectation in the cell-phone location information that a geofence query reaches. The third-party doctrine did not strip that protection away merely because the data resided with Google.

The holding that a search occurred did not, however, resolve the case. The Fourth Amendment bars only unreasonable searches, and the warrant here was an uncommon multi-step warrant. Whether it satisfied the Amendment’s particularity requirement and rested on probable cause at each of its steps were questions the Fourth Circuit had never addressed. Describing itself as “a court of review, not of first view,” the Court declined to take them up in the first instance, vacating the en banc judgment, 136 F.4th 100, and remanding.

The lineup beyond the majority signaled how contested the ground remains. Justice Jackson filed a concurring opinion, joined by Justice Sotomayor; Justice Gorsuch concurred in the judgment. Justice Alito dissented, with Justice Thomas joining as to Part I and Justice Barrett joining as to Parts II–B, II–C–1, and II–C–2; Justice Barrett filed a separate dissent. The fractures that marked the Fourth Circuit’s en banc effort did not vanish at the Supreme Court — they were resolved only as to the threshold search question, by a majority of five.

Why the outcome matters beyond one robbery

The geofence sits alongside a family of dragnet tools — reverse keyword-search warrants, automated license-plate readers, and law-enforcement purchases of data from commercial brokers — that share the same structure: start with no suspect, search a population, and identify a target. By holding that acquiring location data of this kind is a search, the Court has given lower courts a constitutional anchor for that whole category, even as the harder, case-specific question of when such a search is reasonable remains to be worked out below. The deeper debate over location dragnets is canvassed in the analysis of geofence warrants and the Fourth Amendment, and developments are followed in the commentary and the case tracker.

Attention now shifts to the Fourth Circuit, where the particularity and probable-cause analysis the Supreme Court declined to conduct will play out. Chatrie marks the first time the highest court has confronted the geofence directly — and its core move, recognizing a reasonable expectation of privacy in cell-phone location information, signals that digital privacy does not evaporate simply because the data lives somewhere other than the phone in a pocket.