---
title: "Supreme Court Rules Geofence Warrants Are a Search Under the Fourth Amendment"
description: "In a significant win for digital privacy, the Supreme Court ruled 6-3 on Monday that 'geofence' warrants — which sweep up location data from every phone in a defined area — are a search under the Fourth Amendment, imposing new constitutional limits on a surveillance tool police have quietly used for years."
category: "U.S."
category_url: https://herald.la/category/us
author: "Lucía Fuentes"
published: 2026-06-29T15:48:00.000Z
updated: 2026-06-29T15:48:00.000Z
canonical: https://herald.la/article/supreme-court-rules-geofence-warrants-are-a-search-under-the-fourth-amendment
tags: ["Supreme Court", "Fourth Amendment", "geofence warrants", "privacy", "Google", "surveillance", "Chatrie"]
---
# Supreme Court Rules Geofence Warrants Are a Search Under the Fourth Amendment

In a significant win for digital privacy, the Supreme Court ruled 6-3 on Monday that 'geofence' warrants — which sweep up location data from every phone in a defined area — are a search under the Fourth Amendment, imposing new constitutional limits on a surveillance tool police have quietly used for years.

A surveillance technique that lets police ask a tech company who was near a crime scene — and catch hundreds of bystanders in the net — just ran into the Constitution.

## A dragnet built from your phone

For years, investigators have served "geofence" warrants on Google, demanding the location records of every device inside a chosen area during a chosen time. On Monday, in *Chatrie v. United States*, the Supreme Court ruled 6-3 that compelling such records is a Fourth Amendment search — meaning it must satisfy the Constitution's demands for probable cause and particularity, [NPR reported](https://www.npr.org/2026/06/29/nx-s1-5844697/supreme-court-restricts-use-of-geofence-warrants).

## The case

The dispute grew out of a 2019 bank robbery in Midlothian, Virginia, in which a thief made off with about $195,000. With the investigation stalled, agents obtained a geofence warrant covering a 150-meter radius around the bank for a one-hour window. Google returned anonymized data on 19 devices, then narrowed to nine, then de-anonymized three users — including Okello Chatrie, who was charged. Lower courts split badly over whether the warrant amounted to a search at all, [SCOTUSblog noted](https://www.scotusblog.com/cases/chatrie-v-united-states/).

## What the Court held

Writing for the majority, Justice Elena Kagan rejected the government's argument that Chatrie surrendered any privacy by letting Google collect his location. "A cell-phone user is not to be viewed as sharing private information with third parties — which then can be freely passed on to the government — just by doing the ordinary things cell-phone users do," she wrote. People retain a reasonable expectation of privacy in their phone's location records, the majority held, even when those records sit on a company's servers.

But the Court did not strike down the specific warrant. It vacated the lower-court ruling and sent the case back to examine whether the warrant met probable cause and particularity at each step of Google's phased disclosure. Justices Ketanji Brown Jackson and Sonia Sotomayor concurred to stress the rejection of the "third-party doctrine" for digital data; Justice Neil Gorsuch concurred in the judgment.

In dissent, Justice Samuel Alito — joined in part by Justices Clarence Thomas and Amy Coney Barrett — argued that users voluntarily share location data under a company's terms of service, and warned the ruling would hamper legitimate investigations.

## Why it matters now

There is a practical twist: Google [stopped storing](https://www.usnews.com/news/top-news/articles/2026-06-29/us-supreme-court-orders-lower-court-to-reconsider-geofence-warrant-case) users' Location History on its own servers in 2023, keeping it on devices instead — so it can no longer answer the kind of warrant used against Chatrie. The ruling's sharpest effect will fall on other holders of location data, from other platforms to wireless carriers.

For police, the decision raises the bar for a once-cheap fishing tool. And it lands with particular resonance in California, whose privacy laws are among the nation's strongest; the new federal floor gives California defendants a constitutional argument where they previously had mainly state-law claims, and may prompt state legislators to build further protections atop it.

## Sources

- [Supreme Court restricts use of geofence warrants](https://www.npr.org/2026/06/29/nx-s1-5844697/supreme-court-restricts-use-of-geofence-warrants)
- [Chatrie v. United States — case page](https://www.scotusblog.com/cases/chatrie-v-united-states/)
- [U.S. Supreme Court orders lower court to reconsider geofence warrant case](https://www.usnews.com/news/top-news/articles/2026-06-29/us-supreme-court-orders-lower-court-to-reconsider-geofence-warrant-case)