Supreme Court to Rule on Police Use of Geofence Warrants

The U.S. Supreme Court is set to hear arguments in a case that could reshape how law enforcement uses cellphone location data to investigate crimes. At issue is the constitutionality of geofence warrants, which allow police to compel tech companies like Google to identify users whose devices were present in a defined geographic area during a specific time window—without first identifying a suspect. The case, Chatrie v. United States, stems from a 2019 bank robbery in Midlothian, Virginia, where Okello Chatrie was convicted of robbing a credit union at gunpoint and fleeing with approximately $195,000. Police obtained a geofence warrant from Google for location data in the area around the bank during the robbery, which helped narrow down devices and lead investigators to Chatrie. Lower courts have split on the issue, with the Fourth Circuit reviewing the case en banc and dividing evenly, while the Fifth Circuit has ruled in a separate case that such warrants are inherently overbroad and violate the Fourth Amendment. Proponents argue geofence warrants are valuable for "no-suspect" investigations, helping police generate leads when traditional methods fall short. Critics contend the warrants amount to a digital dragnet that sweeps up location information on potentially hundreds or thousands of innocent people, raising serious privacy concerns. In Carpenter v. United States (2018), the Supreme Court held that police generally need a warrant to obtain extended cell-site location information (CSLI) because individuals have a reasonable expectation of privacy in such data. The Chatrie case asks whether similar protections apply to app-based location data and whether geofence warrants satisfy the Fourth Amendment’s requirements for particularity and probable cause.