The Supreme Court heard oral argument on April 27, 2026, in Chatrie v. United States (No. 25-112), a case that will determine whether geofence warrants — court orders compelling a service provider to disclose location data for all devices present within a defined geographic area during a specified time window — are constitutional under the Fourth Amendment. A ruling is expected before the Court's term closes, likely by late June or early July 2026.

The mechanics matter here. Reuters reported on argument day that these warrants let investigators cast a digital net over a place and time, pulling device identifiers from anyone who happened to be present — bystander, suspect, or otherwise. For law enforcement, that breadth is the point: in cases where a perpetrator is unknown, location data can narrow a pool of suspects. For civil libertarians, the same breadth is the constitutional defect.

The Fourth Amendment Question

The Fourth Amendment's particularity requirement demands that a warrant describe with specificity the place to be searched and the persons or things to be seized. The core dispute in Chatrie is whether a geofence warrant — by definition targeting a location rather than a named suspect or known device — satisfies that requirement, or whether it functions as the kind of general warrant the Framers wrote the Amendment to prohibit.

An amicus brief filed March 2, 2026 by the Project for Privacy and Surveillance Accountability (PPSA) takes the harder line: geofence warrants are general warrants, categorically forbidden by the Fourth Amendment, not merely warrants that require more careful tailoring.

Professor Orin Kerr, the Fourth Amendment scholar, filed on the opposite side. His April 1, 2026 amicus brief argues that geofence warrants are constitutionally permissible and that the specific warrant at issue in Chatrie was drawn narrowly enough to satisfy particularity. Kerr's framing — that the question is one of calibration, not categorical prohibition — is the position the government has leaned on, and it gives the Court a middle path: uphold this warrant while articulating standards that constrain future ones.

What the Amicus Filings Reveal

The breadth of third-party interest in this case reflects how much rides on the outcome. Google, which holds the Location History data at the center of Chatrie, filed its own amicus brief on March 1, 2026. The company's intervention is notable: as the dominant holder of the location data that makes geofence warrants operationally possible, Google has a direct commercial and legal stake in whatever framework the Court establishes. Its brief addresses both the constitutional question and the practical architecture of Location History data — how it is collected, stored, and disclosed — details the Justices may need to assess whether a geofence demand can ever be made sufficiently particular.

The Center for Democracy and Technology, filing February 27, 2026, argued that geofence warrants threaten the free exercise of activities foundational to democratic life — protest attendance, medical appointments, religious services — because individuals cannot know in advance that their location is being swept into a criminal investigation simply by virtue of proximity to a crime scene.

The CDT's argument maps onto a concern the Court has been developing since Carpenter v. United States (2018), where Chief Justice Roberts, writing for a 5-4 majority, held that long-term cell-site location data carries Fourth Amendment protection despite being held by a third party. Chatrie asks whether that logic extends — and whether it imposes structural limits on the warrant instrument itself, not just on warrantless collection.

What Comes Next

The practical stakes are substantial. Federal and state investigators have relied on geofence warrants in thousands of cases, including the January 6, 2021 Capitol breach prosecution. A ruling that categorically invalidates geofence warrants would require law enforcement to develop alternative investigative methods and could unsettle prior convictions obtained with such evidence. A ruling that validates them with guardrails would push the particularity analysis down to district courts, producing litigation over whether any given warrant's geographic and temporal scope was sufficiently narrow.

The Court could also decline to resolve the categorical question and rule narrowly on the specific warrant before it — a characteristically cautious move that would leave the broader constitutional framework unsettled and guarantee further litigation. Given the division among the amici and the technological complexity of the underlying data architecture, that kind of limited ruling would not be surprising.

A decision is anticipated before the end of the current term.