The Supreme Court Is About to Decide Whether the Government Can Use a Digital Dragnet to Find One Suspect
Imagine the police want to find out who robbed a bank. Instead of investigating leads and building a case the old-fashioned way, they go to Google and say: "Tell us the identity of every single person whose phone was within two blocks of this bank between 2:00 and 3:00 p.m. last Tuesday." That is a geofence warrant — and later this month, the United States Supreme Court will decide whether it violates your Fourth Amendment rights.
The case is Chatrie v. United States, and oral argument is set for April 27, 2026. It literally began with a bank robbery: on May 20, 2019, a bank in Virginia was robbed, and local police obtained a geofence warrant directed at Google to find the culprit. That warrant ultimately identified Okello Chatrie as a suspect, leading to his arrest and conviction. Now Chatrie is asking the Supreme Court whether the warrant that caught him was constitutional at all.
At its core, the question is simple: Can the government cast a digital dragnet over an entire neighborhood and scoop up the location data of hundreds or thousands of innocent people, just to find one suspect?
How Geofence Warrants Actually Work
When law enforcement submits a geofence warrant to Google, the process unfolds in three stages. First, Google searches its location history database — which covers an estimated 592 million accounts — and returns anonymized data on every device present in a defined geographic area during a defined time window. Second, officers review that anonymized data and flag devices of interest, for which Google then provides additional contextual location information. Third, law enforcement compels Google to reveal the actual account-identifying information for a narrowed set of those devices.
That first step is the constitutional flashpoint. Before a single suspect is identified, Google has already searched the records of hundreds of millions of people. Critics argue that is the definition of a general warrant — the exact instrument the Founders wrote the Fourth Amendment to prohibit.
The Circuit Split — and Why It Is More Complicated Than a Clean Tie
The federal courts of appeals are divided on this issue, though the split is messier than a simple two-sided disagreement.
The Fifth Circuit — which covers Texas, Louisiana, and Mississippi — has taken the strongest position against geofence warrants. In United States v. Smith (2024), the court held that geofence warrants are unconstitutional "modern-day general warrants" categorically prohibited by the Fourth Amendment. The reasoning: because executing a geofence warrant requires Google to search its entire database of hundreds of millions of users before narrowing to a single suspect, law enforcement has no idea who they are looking for when the search begins. That, the court said, is the quintessential general warrant — "the exact sort of general, exploratory rummaging that the Fourth Amendment was designed to prevent."
One critical nuance: the Fifth Circuit's constitutional holding did not actually result in suppression of the evidence in Smith. The court found that officers had relied on the warrant in good faith and allowed the evidence to be used at trial. So even in the circuit most hostile to geofence warrants, the practical outcome for that set of defendants was the same as everywhere else.
The Fourth Circuit's position is harder to summarize neatly. After a three-judge panel found no Fourth Amendment violation, the full court reheard the case en banc. The en banc court issued a single unsigned sentence affirming the denial of suppression — but it was accompanied by eight separate concurrences and a dissent totaling more than 100 pages, and the court split 7–7 on the threshold question of whether a search had even occurred. The court allowed the evidence, but it could not agree on why. That is not a clean vindication of geofence warrants; it is a court that could not reach consensus on one of the most important surveillance questions of the digital age.
The Supreme Court will now resolve what the circuits could not.
What the Supreme Court Will Decide
The justices have agreed to answer whether the execution of a geofence warrant violated the Fourth Amendment. That question has two major dimensions:
First, was it a "search" at all? The government's argument is that users voluntarily opted in to sharing their location history with Google, and therefore have no reasonable expectation of privacy in that data under the so-called "third-party doctrine." The Fourth Circuit panel accepted this reasoning. The Fifth Circuit rejected it, analogizing geofence data to the cell-site location information the Supreme Court protected in Carpenter v. United States (2018).
Second, even if it was a search, was the warrant constitutionally adequate? A valid warrant must describe the place to be searched and the things to be seized with particularity. Chatrie's position is that a warrant commanding Google to search every account in its global database lacks that particularity — you cannot describe "all 592 million users' location records" as a particular place to be searched.
A decision is expected by the end of June 2026.
What This Means for the Fifth Circuit — and for Texas Federal Cases
If you are facing federal criminal charges in Texas — in the Eastern, Northern, Southern, or Western District — and the government used a geofence warrant to build its case, the Fifth Circuit's holding in Smith is currently binding precedent. Under Smith, such a warrant is unconstitutional. The harder question is whether the evidence obtained can be suppressed.
Smith demonstrates the problem: the good-faith exception to the exclusionary rule allows courts to admit evidence obtained through an unconstitutional search if officers reasonably relied on a warrant they believed to be valid. In practice, this means that even in the Fifth Circuit — the most favorable forum in the country for a geofence warrant challenge — suppression is not automatic. Defense counsel in federal cases must still argue that good faith should not apply, for example because the warrant was so clearly overbroad that no reasonable officer could have relied on it.
The Supreme Court's decision in Chatrie will supersede Smith on the federal constitutional question. If the Court rules that geofence warrants are constitutional, Smith's categorical prohibition will be overruled for federal courts in this circuit. If the Court agrees with the Fifth Circuit's reasoning — or goes further and rules that the evidence must be suppressed — it will strengthen challenges across the country.
The Fifth Circuit Cannot Bind Texas State Courts — and That Gap Already Matters
This is a distinction that surprises many people, including some defendants: the Fifth Circuit's ruling in Smith is not binding on Texas state courts.
The Fifth Circuit is a federal appellate court. Its decisions are binding precedent only for federal district courts within its geographic territory. Texas state courts — including the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals, the state's highest court for criminal matters — are bound only by decisions of the United States Supreme Court on questions of federal constitutional law. When the Supreme Court has not yet spoken, state courts are free to interpret the Fourth Amendment on their own.
The Texas Court of Criminal Appeals exercised that independence in 2025, when it issued its own ruling on geofence warrant constitutionality in Wells v. State. The result was a fractured opinion: four of the eight participating judges concluded that the warrant at issue was supported by probable cause and provided sufficient particularity. That outcome is in direct tension with the Fifth Circuit's categorical position in Smith — and it was reached entirely independently, because the CCA was under no obligation to follow federal circuit precedent.
This creates a troubling divergence that directly affects Texans. A defendant charged in federal court in Texas benefits from Smith's strong constitutional holding (subject to the good-faith complication). A defendant facing the same evidencein Texas state court does not. The CCA's Wells plurality suggests the state courts will be far less receptive to a geofence challenge under current law.
How SCOTUS's Cert Grant Changes the Calculus for State Court Litigants
The Supreme Court's decision to hear Chatrie matters for Texas state court defendants even before a ruling is issued — and the effect will be decisive once one comes down.
Before the ruling: The mere fact that the Supreme Court granted certiorari signals that the constitutional question is genuinely unsettled. Defense attorneys in Texas state court proceedings can use that to argue courts should proceed cautiously — for example, by seeking to continue cases, preserve suppression arguments for appeal, or argue that Wellsshould not be read as foreclosing further review. A pending SCOTUS case on the precise constitutional question is a strong reason to hold the record open.
After the ruling: A Supreme Court decision interpreting the Fourth Amendment's application to geofence warrants will be binding on every court in the country — state and federal. If the Court holds that a geofence warrant constitutes a Fourth Amendment search requiring a particularized warrant, every Texas state court will be required to apply that standard. The CCA's Wells plurality reasoning, to the extent it conflicts with the Supreme Court's holding, will be displaced.
The practical implication: if you have a pending Texas state court case in which geofence data was used, the period between now and the Court's June 2026 decision is critical. Suppression motions should be filed now to preserve the issue. Arguments should be framed in terms that will survive whatever standard the Supreme Court adopts. And if the Court rules favorably, defendants with final convictions may have avenues for post-conviction relief, depending on whether the ruling is applied retroactively — a separate and complex question.
The Bigger Picture
Law enforcement agencies across the country have used geofence warrants in drug investigations, firearms cases, and even to identify participants in protests. If you have been charged with a federal crime and the government used your phone's location data to build its case, the legality of that evidence is genuinely in play — and the answer may arrive as soon as this summer.
Whatever the Supreme Court decides in Chatrie, it will set the rules for digital surveillance in America for a generation. The only question is whether those rules will protect everyone in the geofence, or only the person the government was looking for.
This article discusses general legal developments and is not legal advice. If you have been charged with a crime and believe geofence warrant evidence was used against you, consult a qualified criminal defense attorney.