Supreme Court Rules Geofence Warrants Are a Search Under the Fourth Amendment

In Chatrie v. United States, a 6-3 Supreme Court held that a Google geofence warrant for cellphone location data is a search, putting police location tracking under Fourth Amendment scrutiny.

Supreme Court Rules Geofence Warrants Are a Search Under the Fourth Amendment In Chatrie v. United States, a 6-3 Supreme Court held that a Google geofence warrant for cellphone location data is a search, putting police location tracking under Fourth Amendment scrutiny. Aaron Rafferty June 29, 2026 Key Takeaways The Supreme Court ruled 6-3 on June 29, 2026, that a geofence warrant for cellphone location data is a search under the Fourth Amendment. Justice Elena Kagan wrote that people keep a reasonable expectation of privacy in records of where their phone has been, even when a third-party company holds the data. The justices sent Okello Chatrie's case back to the Fourth Circuit to decide whether the search was reasonable, putting police use of geofence warrants on notice. The Supreme Court ruled on Monday that when police used a geofence warrant to pull Google location data on everyone near a 2019 Virginia bank robbery, they carried out a search under the Fourth Amendment. The 6-3 decision in Chatrie v. United States, reported by SCOTUSblog , sends the case back to a lower court to weigh whether that search was reasonable. A geofence warrant draws a virtual boundary around a place and a time, then asks a tech company to identify every user inside it. In the Chatrie case, Google first handed over 19 accounts within 150 meters of the bank during the half hour around the robbery, then nine accounts across a two-hour window, and finally the names tied to three accounts, one of them Chatrie's. That trail led police to roughly $100,000 in stolen cash, a gun, and the demand notes. Writing for the majority, Justice Elena Kagan held that a person keeps a reasonable expectation of privacy in the records of where a phone has been, and that police intrude on that interest w