Geofence Warrants Reach the Supreme Court in Chatrie v. United States

The Supreme Court has agreed to take up one of the most consequential digital-privacy questions of the modern era: whether the government conducts a Fourth Amendment "search" when it executes a geofence warrant compelling Google to identify every device within a defined geographic area during a specific time window.

The facts are straightforward. In 2019, law enforcement obtained a warrant requiring Google to produce anonymized location data for all devices within 150 meters of a credit union in Midlothian, Virginia during the hour surrounding an armed robbery. Through a three-step narrowing process, investigators identified Okello Chatrie as a suspect. The district court concluded the warrant "plainly" violated the Fourth Amendment but declined to suppress the evidence under the good-faith exception. A divided Fourth Circuit panel affirmed on different grounds, holding that Chatrie had voluntarily shared his location data with Google and therefore had no reasonable expectation of privacy—triggering no "search" at all. On en banc rehearing, fourteen of fifteen judges signed a one-sentence per curiam affirming, while generating eight separate concurrences and a dissent totaling over 140 pages of analysis without agreement on a rationale.

The doctrinal stakes are significant. Chatrie argues that Carpenter v. United States (2018)—which held that government access to seven or more days of cell-site location data constitutes a search—controls here. Geofence warrants are inherently untargeted: they sweep in innocent bystanders who happened to be nearby, implicating privacy interests the third-party doctrine was never designed to extinguish at scale. The government counters that Chatrie voluntarily opted in to Google's Location History feature, voluntarily exposing his data to a third party under Smith v. Maryland (1979). Adding pressure, the Fifth Circuit reached the opposite conclusion in United States v. Smith—holding geofence warrants categorically unconstitutional as general warrants—creating the kind of federal circuit split the Court exists to resolve.

Petitioner Adam G. Unikowsky of Jenner & Block argues for Chatrie. Solicitor General D. John Sauer defends the government. The case will also test the reach of Carpenter, the Court's most significant digital-privacy decision in decades. SCOTUSblog's full case page has the record, and the Brookings Institution offers a useful technical primer on how geofence warrants work in practice. A decision is expected by late June 2026.