United States v. Chatrie: Fourth Amendment and Geofence Warrants

United States v. Chatrie is the Fourth Amendment case, now pending before the U.S. Supreme Court, that will decide whether police violate the Constitution when they use a geofence warrant to obtain Google location data on every device near a crime scene. The Fourth Circuit, sitting en banc, ruled in April 2025 that pulling two hours of Okello Chatrie’s Google Location History was not a “search” at all because he had voluntarily shared that data with Google. That holding directly conflicts with a Fifth Circuit decision striking down geofence warrants as unconstitutional general warrants. The Supreme Court granted certiorari on January 16, 2026, and oral argument is set for April 27, 2026.¹

The Robbery and the Warrant

In May 2019, an armed gunman took $195,000 from the Call Federal Credit Union in Midlothian, Virginia, and fled west ahead of arriving police.² Witnesses and security footage produced few leads, but one detail caught investigators’ attention: the robber appeared to be carrying a cell phone. With conventional methods stalled, Detective Joshua Hylton sought a court order directing Google to identify every device that had been near the credit union around the time of the crime.

The geofence Hylton drew had a 150-meter radius around the bank, covering a diameter longer than three football fields in an urban area that also swept in a nearby church. The warrant initially targeted a one-hour window around the robbery, then expanded by thirty minutes on each side to cover two hours in total.³ A grand jury in the Eastern District of Virginia later indicted Chatrie for armed credit union robbery and using a firearm during a crime of violence. He moved to suppress the location evidence, entered a conditional guilty plea after the district court denied that motion, and appealed.

How a Geofence Warrant Works

A geofence warrant flips the usual investigative sequence. Instead of naming a suspect and asking a court to authorize a search of that person’s property, police draw a shape on a map and ask a technology company to identify every device inside it during a specific window. There is no suspect at the start. There is only a location and a time.

In Chatrie’s case the process ran in three steps. Google first queried its Location History database and returned an anonymized list of the nineteen devices present in the geofence area during the relevant period.³ Investigators then studied that anonymized data for movement patterns consistent with the robbery, and could go back to Google for expanded location histories showing where a device had traveled before and after the crime. Once they narrowed the field to a handful of devices they believed belonged to the suspect, they asked Google to unmask the accounts and produce the names and email addresses tied to them. That last step identified Chatrie.

Google’s location data draws from GPS, cell towers, Wi-Fi networks, and Bluetooth beacons, producing fixes that can locate a user within meters and estimate what floor of a building they are on. Between 2018 and 2020, Google received more than 20,000 geofence warrant requests, climbing from roughly 980 in 2018 to over 11,500 in 2020.

The Fourth Circuit’s Fractured Ruling

The full Fourth Circuit affirmed the denial of suppression through a brief per curiam opinion, but the fifteen judges split 7–7 on the threshold question of whether the government had conducted a “search” at all.⁴ The real reasoning lives in the concurrences.

The No-Search View

Seven judges, led by Judge Richardson, concluded no Fourth Amendment search occurred because the third-party doctrine stripped Chatrie of any reasonable expectation of privacy in what he had shared with Google. That doctrine, drawn from Smith v. Maryland (1979) and United States v. Miller (1976), holds that a person has no privacy interest in information voluntarily turned over to a third party.

The Richardson concurrence drew a sharp line between Google Location History and the cell-site location information the Supreme Court protected in Carpenter v. United States (2018).⁵ CSLI is generated automatically whenever a phone connects to a tower, whether the user knows it or not. Location History, by contrast, is off by default, requires several affirmative steps to turn on, comes with disclosures about what Google collects, and can be reviewed, edited, or deleted at any time. Two-thirds of active Google users have never turned it on. Because Chatrie opted in, the concurring judges concluded, he assumed the risk that Google might share his data with the government.

These judges also emphasized how little data was at issue. Two hours of location information, they wrote, is “far less revealing” than the seven days of CSLI in Carpenter, closer to observing a single trip in public than to weeks of comprehensive surveillance.³

The Opposing View

The other seven judges still voted to affirm, but they refused to endorse the no-search reasoning. Chief Judge Diaz concurred solely on the good-faith exception, arguing the court should avoid a sweeping constitutional pronouncement when it could resolve the case on the narrower ground that Detective Hylton had reasonably relied on the warrant at a time when no court had ruled on the technique.³

Judge Berner and several colleagues went further. They accepted that the anonymized Step 1 return was not a search, but argued that the later steps, where investigators pulled expanded location histories and then unmasked specific accounts, did implicate the Fourth Amendment. Location History, in their view, is qualitatively different from the bank records and dialed numbers in Smith and Miller. It tracks users automatically roughly every two minutes, pinpoints them within meters, and is retained indefinitely. Cell phones are indispensable to modern life, and a frictionless opt-in with partially buried disclosures is not the kind of knowing surrender of privacy the third-party doctrine was built for.⁴

The Fifth Circuit Split

The Fourth Circuit’s ruling collides head-on with the Fifth Circuit’s 2024 decision in United States v. Smith, which held that geofence warrants are “modern-day general warrants” and unconstitutional.⁶ The two courts looked at the same mechanism and asked different questions. The Fourth Circuit majority asked what the individual suspect had voluntarily shared. The Fifth Circuit asked what happens to everyone else.

To find the nineteen devices in the geofence, the Fifth Circuit reasoned, Google had to search its entire Sensorvault database, then containing roughly 592 million accounts. The government was effectively rifling through the location records of hundreds of millions of uninvolved people in the hope one might turn out to matter. That, the court wrote, was “the exact sort of general, exploratory rummaging that the Fourth Amendment was designed to prevent.”⁶ Narrowly tailored results, the Fifth Circuit held, cannot cure a search that is itself general in scope, and police cannot escape the Fourth Amendment by outsourcing the search to a private company.

What the Supreme Court Will Decide

Chatrie filed his cert petition in July 2025. The Supreme Court granted review on January 16, 2026, on a single question: whether the execution of the geofence warrant in his case violated the Fourth Amendment.⁷ Oral argument is scheduled for April 27, 2026.

This is the Court’s first direct look at geofence warrants and its first opportunity to say how far Carpenter reaches into the era of app-based location tracking. A ruling that geofence warrants require no Fourth Amendment scrutiny would give police broad latitude to run dragnet location searches. A ruling the other way could impose strict limits on when and how the government can pull bulk location data from technology companies.

What This Means for Your Location Data

Google has already changed its architecture in ways that will affect future cases regardless of how the Court rules. The company shifted its Timeline feature so that location history is stored on individual users’ devices by default rather than on Google’s central servers. If Google no longer maintains a centralized, queryable database of user locations, geofence warrants directed at Google may produce far less, even if the Court blesses them.

You can also limit your own exposure. Turning off Location History in your Google account settings stops that data from being collected going forward. On Android, open Settings, then Google, then Manage Your Google Account, then Data & Privacy, and under “History settings” select Web & App Activity to turn it off or turn it off and delete existing data.⁸ Web & App Activity still captures general area and IP-based location even when Location History is off, so disabling both provides the broadest protection. In Google Maps you can check whether your Timeline data has already moved on-device by opening the app, going to Your Timeline, and tapping the cloud icon. On-device encryption tied to a specific phone means losing that phone can mean permanently losing the data, which is the point if the goal is limiting what someone else can obtain.

1
Supreme Court of the United States. Docket No. 25-112, Chatrie v. United States
2
Justia. United States v. Chatrie, No. 22-4489 (4th Cir. 2024)
3
United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit. United States v. Chatrie (On Rehearing En Banc)
4
Justia. US v. Okello Chatrie, No. 22-4489 (4th Cir. 2025)
5
Justia. Carpenter v. United States, 585 U.S. ___ (2018)
6
United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit. United States of America v. Jamarr Smith, et al., No. 23-60321
7
Supreme Court of the United States. 25-112 Chatrie v. United States – Questions Presented
8
Google Search Help. Find and Control Your Web and App Activity