On June 29, 2026, the Supreme Court handed criminal defendants a genuine Fourth Amendment victory. In Chatrie v. United States, No. 25-112, the Court held 6-3 that police conduct a search when they obtain a person's Google Location History through a geofence warrant. The third-party doctrine does not defeat the claim. A two-hour window is not too short to matter. Carpenter v. United States now reaches location data measured in hours, not just days.
Chatrie himself is still a defendant. The evidence is still in the case. The Fourth Circuit has not yet ruled on remand, and when it does, the hardest question in the case will still be waiting: whether the officers acted in good faith. That question was resolved against Chatrie in 2022 by a federal district judge who, in the same opinion, found the warrant plainly violates the Fourth Amendment.
That gap between the constitutional holding and the evidentiary outcome is the entire story for anyone facing charges built on location data. Chatrie changed what you are allowed to argue. It has not yet changed what any court has been willing to exclude.
What the Court actually held
Justice Kagan wrote the opinion of the Court, holding that "[a]n individual has a legitimate expectation of privacy in the information Location History collects about his cell phone's ... movements." The government argued that a Google user voluntarily hands location data to a third party and therefore keeps no privacy interest in it. The Court rejected that. Kagan reasoned that "modern cell-phone use almost always requires some kind of opt-in action," and that Google's own presentation of the feature made the choice largely illusory. Location data, in the majority's framing, is the automatic price of conventional cell-phone usage.
The government's fallback was duration. Carpenter involved seven days of cell-site location information; the Chesterfield County warrant here covered roughly two hours. The Court declined to treat that as a meaningful distinction, noting that Location History can carry potentially greater privacy interests than the cell-site data in Carpenter because of its precision.
The vote count is not what some coverage says
You will see this decision described as 5-4. That is imprecise. Six Justices agreed a search occurred. Kagan's opinion of the Court drew five votes: Roberts, Sotomayor, Kavanaugh, and Jackson joined her. Gorsuch supplied the sixth vote by concurring in the judgment, reaching the same result through the Fourth Amendment's property and "effects" text rather than through reasonable-expectation-of-privacy analysis.
Justice Jackson wrote a separate concurrence, joined by Sotomayor, arguing that steps two and three of the warrant process handed police excessive discretion with too little judicial supervision. Alito dissented, joined by Thomas as to Part I and by Barrett as to parts of the opinion. Barrett filed a separate dissent. Alito argued the Court should have disposed of the case on good faith, called the ruling an advisory opinion of little benefit to Chatrie, warned of "seismic waves" through Fourth Amendment doctrine, and asked where courts will draw the line for Amazon, Venmo, and Google Search records.
What the Court pointedly did not hold
The Court granted certiorari on one question: is it a search? It answered that question and stopped. In its words, "[b]ecause this is a court of review, not a first view," it left the Fourth Circuit to decide whether, "at each step of the search process, the warrant satisfied the Fourth Amendment's requirements of particularity and probable cause." The en banc judgment, 136 F.4th 100, was vacated and remanded.
Left undecided:
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Whether this warrant, or any geofence warrant, is valid.
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What showing the government must make to obtain one.
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Any permissible geographic radius or time window.
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Whether Google's three-step disclosure process, which the Court called uncommon, is constitutional.
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Whether the good-faith exception applies, because that issue was outside the question presented.
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Whether tower dumps and reverse keyword searches are searches at all.
The decision does not prohibit geofence warrants. It establishes that obtaining the data triggers the Fourth Amendment, which is the beginning of the analysis rather than the end of it.
Fight one: standing, and why it is still worth having
Before June 29, the government's lead argument in most geofence suppression fights was not that the warrant was good. It was that the defendant had no privacy interest in data held by Google and therefore could not challenge the warrant at all. It carried the day in the Fourth Circuit panel decision, 107 F.4th 319 (2024), over Judge Wynn's dissent, and it anchored Judge Richardson's en banc reasoning that two hours of voluntarily exposed Location History carried no reasonable expectation of privacy.
That argument is now foreclosed. A defendant whose account was returned by a geofence warrant has a Fourth Amendment interest and can litigate the warrant's validity on the merits. As one defense analysis put it, establishing that something is a search is step one, not the finish line.
Step one still has value. It forces the government to defend the warrant rather than sidestep it. It creates a record. It preserves the issue for appeal. And in plea negotiations, a motion the prosecution has to brief and argue is worth more than a motion the court can dismiss for lack of standing.
Fight two: good faith, where most of these motions die
Here is the pattern defendants need to understand, because it has repeated in the two most important geofence cases in the federal system.
In March 2022, the Eastern District of Virginia held in Chatrie's own case, 590 F. Supp. 3d 901, that the warrant "plainly violates the rights enshrined in [the Fourth] Amendment." The court denied suppression anyway. The officers' reliance on a magistrate-signed warrant was not objectively unreasonable, so the good-faith exception applied. That ruling was never disturbed on appeal, and it is the central obstacle waiting for Chatrie on remand.
In August 2024, the Fifth Circuit went further in United States v. Smith, No. 23-60321, holding that geofence warrants are general warrants categorically prohibited by the Fourth Amendment. It then affirmed the denial of suppression, citing the novelty of the technique and the absence of governing precedent.
Two courts have said geofence warrants are unconstitutional. Neither ordered the evidence excluded. No federal appellate court has yet done so.
That is the novelty paradox at the heart of good-faith doctrine: the newer and less settled the investigative technique, the more reasonable an officer's reliance on a magistrate's signature appears, and the harder exclusion becomes. Carpenter himself ultimately lost on this ground after winning at the Supreme Court, a point the Just Security analysis of Chatrie makes directly.
The date that now matters most
Chatrie draws a line at June 29, 2026, and it runs in one direction.
Warrants issued after that date face a defined constitutional baseline. An officer can no longer claim the law was unsettled on whether a geofence request implicates the Fourth Amendment. That makes good-faith reliance meaningfully harder to assert going forward.
Warrants issued before that date are unchanged. The novelty argument that carried the day in Chatrie's district court and in Smith remains available to the government, and those are the overwhelming majority of cases currently in litigation.
If you are contesting a geofence warrant obtained in 2019, 2021, or 2023, Chatrie improved your standing and did not improve your suppression odds.
How to litigate a geofence case now
File the motion even when good faith looks fatal. Preservation costs little and the doctrine is moving.
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Do not re-litigate whether it was a search. That is settled. Spend the brief on what the Court left open.
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Attack particularity and probable cause at each step. The remand instruction itself directs the Fourth Circuit to that analysis step by step, which is a roadmap for how to structure the argument.
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Focus on steps two and three. In Chatrie, step one returned anonymized data for 19 accounts within a 150-meter radius over a two-hour window on May 20, 2019. Step two sought expanded data, no longer limited to the geofence, for 9 of those users. Step three de-anonymized 3, including Chatrie. The Jackson concurrence, joined by Sotomayor, targets exactly this: expansion at later steps with insufficient judicial oversight.
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Build the record on scope. How large was the radius? How long was the window? What was in it, a rural intersection or a dense commercial block? How many uninvolved accounts were swept in? Those numbers are the substance of a particularity argument.
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Preserve the good-faith fight separately. Argue that the warrant's defects were obvious enough on their face that no reasonable officer could rely on it, which is the narrow path around the exception.
Geofence evidence appears most often in robbery, homicide, arson, and burglary prosecutions, and also surfaces in drug, firearms, and protest-related cases. If location data anchors the government's identification of you, the warrant is worth attacking regardless of the odds on exclusion.
What the Fourth Circuit could change
The en banc Fourth Circuit split 7-7 on whether a search occurred, with Chief Judge Diaz not participating, and 14 of 15 judges voted to affirm the judgment. The Supreme Court rejected the reasoning of the side that prevailed on the search question. Now that court must decide probable cause, particularity, and the constitutionality of the three-step process.
If it holds the warrant deficient, that is the first federal appellate merits ruling applying Chatrie, and it would sharpen the standard nationwide. Even then, the good-faith finding from 2022 sits waiting, and a defense win on the merits may still end in the evidence coming in.
The target is already shrinking
Google announced in December 2023 that Location History would move to encrypted on-device storage, rebranded as Timeline. The Electronic Frontier Foundation flagged at the time what that would mean for these warrants. Rollout ran through 2024, and migration of server-side data was complete by roughly July 2025. In a March 2026 amicus brief, Google told the Court it had objected to more than 3,000 geofence warrants on constitutional grounds and can no longer respond to them for Location History.
So Chatrie governs a category of evidence that is largely historical. The live litigation is about legacy warrants. The doctrine's future runs through other holders of location data. Apple, Uber, Lyft, and Snapchat all still retain it, as former federal prosecutor Michael Levy notes, and tower dumps and reverse keyword searches remain expressly undecided.
State law may reach further than the Fourth Amendment
Some states are legislating past this problem. California's A.B. 793 would prohibit seeking or complying with reverse keyword and reverse location warrants, provide a statutory suppression remedy, and require notice to affected individuals.
That matters because a statutory suppression remedy does not have to accommodate the good-faith exception the way the Fourth Amendment's judge-made exclusionary rule does. If you are charged in a state with a reverse-warrant statute, that argument may be stronger than the federal constitutional one, and it should be raised alongside it rather than instead of it.
The bottom line
Chatrie is a real decision with real consequences. It closes off the government's best procedural escape hatch and it commits the Court to treating short-window, high-precision location data as constitutionally protected. Those are durable gains.
It is not a suppression ruling. As of today, no federal appellate court has ordered geofence evidence excluded, and the two courts that called these warrants unconstitutional both let the evidence in. For a defendant facing charges right now, the realistic value of Chatrie is leverage in negotiation, a preserved record for appeal, and pressure on the courts that will finally have to set the standard.
Chatrie changed what you can argue. It has not yet changed what comes out.
Related reading
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[A Judge Denied Him Acceptance of Responsibility for Filing a Suppression Motion. The Ninth Circuit Just Vacated That Sentence.](/news/ninth-circuit-aguilera-acceptance-of-responsibility-suppression-motion)
Sources
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Chatrie v. United States, No. 25-112 (U.S. June 29, 2026), slip opinion
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Court rules that law enforcement's use of a geofence warrant was a search (SCOTUSblog)
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Unpacking the Supreme Court's Chatrie Decision (Just Security)
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[Supreme Court Holds Acquisition of Google Location History Through a Geofence Warrant Constitutes a Fourth Amendment Search (Venable LLP)](https://www.venable.com/insights/publications/2026/07/supreme-court-holds-geofence-warrant-access)
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Michael Levy Analyzes Supreme Court Ruling on Geofence Warrants (Penn Carey Law)
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Decision Alert: Supreme Court Holds Geofence Acquisition Is a Fourth Amendment Search
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Supreme Court Decides Geofence Warrant Case But Punts on Reasonableness (IMLA)
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Supreme Court Rules Geofence Warrants Are Fourth Amendment Searches (Freeman Mathis & Gary)
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Supreme Court Rules Geofence Warrant Is a Search: What Chatrie Means for You (D'Angelo Legal)
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United States v. Smith, No. 23-60321 (5th Cir. Aug. 9, 2024), slip opinion
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United States v. Chatrie, 136 F.4th 100 (4th Cir. 2025) (en banc)
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Geofence Warrants and the Fourth Amendment: The Supreme Court Weighs In (CRS LSB11274)
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Geofence and Keyword Searches: Reverse Warrants and the Fourth Amendment (CRS R48852)
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Is This the End of Geofence Warrants? (Electronic Frontier Foundation)
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The Google Maps Location History/Timeline change is still rolling out (9to5Google)
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AB 793: reverse keyword and geofence search warrants (ACLU California Action)
Note: This article contains AI-assisted content and has been reviewed by our editorial team.
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