TBA Law Blog


Posted by: Julia Wilburn on Jul 6, 2026

The U.S. Supreme Court on June 29 ruled 6-3 that law enforcement's use of geofence warrants to access cell phone location history constitutes a Fourth Amendment search requiring a warrant, though the majority opinion by Justice Elena Kagan declined to define when such warrants are constitutionally valid. Bloomberg Law reports that the case arose from Okello Chatrie's conviction in a 2019 Virginia credit union robbery, where a multi-step geofence warrant to Google ultimately identified him as a suspect. Rather than resolving the case, the court sent it back to the 4th Circuit to determine whether the warrant satisfied the Constitution's particularity and probable cause requirements. Justices Samuel Alito and Amy Coney Barrett dissented while Neil Gorsuch concurred only in the judgment. The ruling builds on the court's 2018 Carpenter decision and arrives as Google says it can no longer comply with such warrants, having migrated location history data off its servers last year. Read the ruling.