Geofence Warrants in 2026

Few investigative tools have moved from obscurity to the United States Supreme Court as quickly as the geofence warrant. A decade ago, almost no one had heard the term. Today it sits at the center of a national argument about privacy, police power, and the data our phones generate without our knowledge. With the Supreme Court having heard argument in Chatrie v. United States in April 2026, the stakes for both prosecution and defense have never been higher.¹

This article walks through what a geofence warrant actually is, how the underlying process works, the practical weaknesses that make these searches vulnerable to challenge, and where courts are landing as the law continues to shift.

What a Geofence Warrant Is, and Why It Is Different

A traditional warrant starts with a suspect. Police develop probable cause that a specific person committed a crime, then ask a court for permission to search that person, their home, or their accounts. A geofence warrant runs the process in reverse. Instead of starting with a suspect, law enforcement starts with a place and a time, then asks a technology company to identify every device that was present.

For this reason these are often called reverse location warrants. Law enforcement defines a geographic boundary—a digital fence—around a crime scene and a window of time, then compels a provider to search its entire store of user location data to find all devices inside that fence.² In practice the provider has almost always been Google, because Google historically collected and retained location data for a very large share of smartphone users in a central database it called Sensorvault. At one point Google reported that geofence requests made up roughly a quarter of all the warrants it received in a year.³

The constitutional concern follows directly from that design. A geofence warrant does not name a suspect. It sweeps in everyone who happened to be near a location, including people with no connection to the crime. The only evidence supporting it is that a crime occurred in a particular area and the offender probably carried a phone. Critics describe this as the kind of general, exploratory rummaging the Fourth Amendment was written to prevent.⁴

The Three-Step Process

Because the law has been unsettled for years, the procedure for executing these warrants has been shaped largely by Google's own corporate policy rather than by statute. Google developed a three-step protocol intended to narrow the search and protect uninvolved users, and most warrants now track that structure.⁵

Step one. Law enforcement obtains a warrant compelling Google to disclose an anonymized list of all accounts whose location history places them inside the defined geofence during the specified time window. Each device is given an anonymized identifier rather than a name.⁶

Step two. After reviewing that list, investigators select a subset of devices that look relevant and ask Google for additional location data on those devices, often over an expanded time period that reaches beyond the original geographic and temporal limits.

Step three. Investigators narrow the list further and ask Google to unmask the remaining accounts, providing subscriber information such as the user's name, email address, phone number, and account details. This is the de-anonymization stage.

The Chatrie case illustrates how broad the first step can be. The warrant there drew a geofence with a 150-meter radius around a bank near Richmond, Virginia, covering roughly 17.5 acres of an urban area that included a church, a hotel, a restaurant, a senior living facility, an apartment complex, and two busy streets, for a one-hour window. Google's initial search returned data on nineteen devices. Investigators then sought expanded data on nine, and finally de-anonymized three. Okello Chatrie was one of those three.⁷

Where the Law Stands After Chatrie

The legal landscape has fractured, which is precisely why the Supreme Court stepped in.

In August 2024, the Fifth Circuit held in United States v. Smith that geofence warrants are categorically prohibited by the Fourth Amendment, comparing them to the general searches the founders intended to outlaw. The court still allowed the evidence in that particular case under the good-faith exception, because the technology was novel when the warrant was executed, but the constitutional holding was sweeping.⁸

The Chatrie litigation took a different path. A Virginia district court found the warrant problematic but declined to suppress the evidence, relying on the good-faith exception. A Fourth Circuit panel affirmed in July 2024 on the ground that Chatrie had no reasonable expectation of privacy in the location data at issue. The full Fourth Circuit reheard the case and, on April 30, 2025, issued a one-line per curiam opinion affirming the district court.⁹

That left a clear circuit split. In January 2026, the Supreme Court granted certiorari to decide the extent to which executing a geofence warrant violates the Fourth Amendment. The Court declined to take up a separate question about whether the exclusionary rule applies. Oral argument was heard in April 2026, and several justices appeared receptive to the government's argument that these searches are a valuable investigative tool, even as the privacy concerns drew sharp questioning.¹⁰

State courts have not waited for a federal answer. In a 2025 decision, the Georgia Supreme Court upheld warrants used to navigate Google's three-step process, finding probable cause supported them. Earlier, the California Court of Appeal in People v. Meza found a Los Angeles geofence warrant unconstitutional because it covered densely populated areas without adequate limits.¹¹

Until the Supreme Court rules, attorneys should assume the answer depends heavily on jurisdiction. What is suppressible in one circuit may be admissible in another.

The Google Storage Change and Why It Matters

In late 2023, Google announced changes to how it stores location history. Going forward, that data would be stored by default on the user's own device rather than in Google's cloud, retention would default to three months instead of eighteen, and the data would be protected with end-to-end encryption.¹²

The practical consequence is significant. Google has indicated it will no longer be able to respond to new geofence warrants for this category of data, because it will not hold the aggregated location history that made the searches possible in the first place. To obtain location history now, law enforcement generally needs physical access to the device itself—through consent or seizure—rather than a server-side dragnet.¹³

Looking Ahead

The Supreme Court's forthcoming decision in Chatrie will likely set the boundaries for how law enforcement uses location technology for years to come. Whatever the outcome, the underlying tension is not going away. Our devices generate detailed records of where we go, and the legal system is still working out who may access those records and under what conditions.

For investigators and attorneys on either side, the practical takeaway is the same. Understand the mechanics, know your jurisdiction, and examine each warrant on its specific facts. The difference between admissible and suppressible evidence often turns on the details of how a single fence was drawn and how a single warrant was executed.

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