Supreme Court Geofence Warrants Case: What Chatrie Could Change

Supreme Court geofence warrants case: what Chatrie could change

The Supreme Court is deciding whether police can cast a digital net over everyone near a crime scene, then work through the catch step by step without ever returning to a judge. The case is Chatrie v. United States, the first geofence warrant case to reach the Court, according to the ACLU. Based on oral argument exchanges, Brookings analysis suggests the justices may be moving toward requiring judicial review at each stage of such a search rather than declaring the entire practice unconstitutional.

The stakes are real. Lower courts have split so sharply on the constitutionality of geofence warrants that the same technique has been called both flatly illegal and entirely unproblematic, sometimes within months of each other. The Court's ruling will be the first major federal precedent on the question.

How the Chatrie geofence warrant worked

A geofence warrant directs a company to hand over location data for every device it tracked within a defined area during a specific time window, as Brookings explains. Police do not name a suspect first. They start with a place and a time, then work backward.

The Chatrie case began with a May 2019 armed robbery at the Call Federal Credit Union in Midlothian, Virginia. After the investigation stalled, law enforcement obtained a geofence warrant directing Google to produce location data for every device within a 300-meter diameter of the bank, per the Supreme Court docket brief. What followed was a three-step process with no magistrate involved after the initial warrant was issued.

At Step 1, Google returned anonymized records for 19 users who had been within the geofence during the 30 minutes before and after the robbery. Officers reviewed those records and then, on their own authority, moved to Step 2: they selected nine of those accounts and requested two hours of movement data that extended beyond the original boundary, tracking those individuals both inside and outside the geofenced area. At Step 3, without returning to court, they asked Google to identify three specific users by name. One of them was Okello Chatrie, who was subsequently indicted on robbery and firearms charges, per the docket brief.

The process works like casting a wide net over a neighborhood, then quietly sorting through what was caught, with officers deciding at each pass who gets scrutinized more closely, and no judge ever approving a second look.

Why the courts can't agree: the split behind Chatrie

The disagreement in the lower courts goes deeper than a geographic circuit split. Courts cannot even agree on the threshold question of whether a search occurs at all.

A three-judge Fourth Circuit panel ruled in July 2024 that Chatrie had no reasonable expectation of privacy in his location data and therefore no search had occurred, effectively removing the warrant from any Fourth Amendment scrutiny, according to Brookings. The full Fourth Circuit then took the case en banc and, in April 2025, affirmed in a single-sentence order while dividing 7-7 on whether a Fourth Amendment search had occurred at all. One judge described the resulting opinions as "a labyrinth of . . . nine . . . advisory opinions," per the docket brief.

The Fifth Circuit reached the opposite conclusion in U.S. v. Smith in 2024, calling geofence warrants "modern-day general warrants" that are flatly unconstitutional under the Fourth Amendment, Brookings reported. Just months later, the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals ruled in Wells v. State that a geofence warrant did not violate the Fourth Amendment at all, the same Brookings analysis noted.

The federal district court in Chatrie's own case found the warrant constitutionally defective but admitted the evidence anyway, applying the good-faith exception, the doctrine that permits evidence obtained under a facially valid warrant even if the warrant is later found flawed, per the ACLU's press release.

That patchwork is what made Chatrie a necessary vehicle. The Supreme Court granted certiorari in January 2026, Brookings reported.

The Fourth Amendment argument: three steps, three separate searches

Chatrie's legal team argues the three-step process constituted three distinct searches under the Fourth Amendment, each requiring its own review by a neutral magistrate before the next round of data could be extracted, per the docket brief. The argument is clearest at Steps 2 and 3, where the data obtained was substantively different from anything the original warrant described.

Step 2 reached beyond the geofence boundary in both geography and time, covering a two-hour window and tracking users' movements outside the original radius entirely, revealing what the docket brief calls "an entirely new body of information covering a different area over a different period." Step 3 then de-anonymized the remaining individuals. Officers learned identities that had previously been concealed, again without judicial approval. The original warrant, Chatrie's counsel Adam Unikowsky told the Court, "doesn't provide any criteria" for how narrowing should happen, Brookings reported.

The scale of the initial search is part of what makes the three-step problem so significant. The warrant covered a 17.5-acre area and required Google to search through hundreds of millions of user accounts, including people at a church, a hotel, and a senior living facility inside the zone, none of them connected to probable cause, according to the amicus brief filed by the ACLU, EFF, and allied groups. By 2021, geofence warrants made up more than 25% of all warrants Google received, the same brief notes. In the January 6 Capitol investigation alone, Google disclosed location data for more than 5,000 devices.

The ACLU, EFF, and others urged the Court to go further: declare all geofence warrants unconstitutional general warrants, categorically. Chatrie's own counsel acknowledged a ruling limited to Steps 2 and 3 would be "a very narrow resolution," but accepted it as sufficient to win the case, Brookings reported. A categorical ban is the harder lift.

The more telling exchange at oral argument came between Justice Sonia Sotomayor and Deputy Solicitor General Eric Feigin. Sotomayor pressed whether requiring officers to return to court at Steps 2 and 3 would be burdensome, noting that many jurisdictions already do exactly that. Feigin replied: "we could do that and with more recent warrants, the government has done that," Brookings reported. That concession goes a long way. If the government is already seeking fresh judicial approval at later stages in newer cases, it is harder to argue that requiring it across the board would be unworkable.

Taken together, those exchanges suggest a potential outcome where the Court finds the warrant unconstitutional specifically because it lacked probable cause and particularity for the approaches used at Steps 2 and 3, rather than ruling on the broader question, Brookings assessed.

Why the ruling still matters after Google's exit

There is an obvious counterpoint: Google restructured how it stores location history data, and as of July 2025, the government acknowledges that geofence searches on Google users under the old model are no longer possible, per the amicus brief. So why does the case matter?

Several reasons. A ruling against the government could affect the admissibility of evidence in pending criminal cases that relied on earlier geofence searches. It would also constrain any future variants of location-based reverse warrants directed at other companies that still aggregate user location data, as Brookings analysis indicates. Google's architecture may have changed; the legal authority to compel similar searches from other data holders has not been resolved.

The deeper point is structural. A technology company making a product decision and a court establishing a constitutional rule are different things. The government has voluntarily adapted its practice with newer warrants, but voluntary compliance is not a constitutional floor. What the Court writes in Chatrie will govern law enforcement conduct regardless of which company is holding the data, and regardless of what product changes come next.

What comes next for geofence warrants and digital privacy law

The narrow ruling oral argument appeared to be trending toward would require fresh judicial approval at each stage whenever a multi-step search substantially expands beyond the original warrant's scope, whether by time, by geography, or by moving from anonymized records to identified individuals. That is a meaningful constraint, even if it stops short of a categorical ban.

The Fourth Amendment's particularity requirement exists precisely to prevent a single authorization from becoming an open-ended license to keep digging. Whether the Court draws that line narrowly around Steps 2 and 3 or broadly around geofence warrants as a category, Chatrie will be the decision that shapes how courts treat the digital equivalent of a general warrant for years to come. The government has already started writing it into its own practice. The question is whether the Constitution requires it of everyone.