WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court will hear Okello Chatrie's appeal on April 27, 2026, to decide whether geofence warrants violate the Fourth Amendment. The case will determine the constitutionality of law enforcement demands for cellphone location data from companies covering specific geographic areas and time periods.

The appeal stems from a May 2019 robbery at a federal credit union in a small town in central Virginia, where a man carrying a gun and a cellphone entered the bank, demanded cash and left with $195,000 in a bag. A police detective sent Google a demand for information known as a geofence warrant for phones within 150 yards of the bank during the hour of the robbery.

The detective used the geofence warrant data to locate Chatrie, then obtained a search warrant for his home and found cash and holdup notes there. Chatrie entered a conditional guilty plea in the case.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 4th Circuit in Virginia divided 7-7 to reject Chatrie's appeal. Judge J. Harvie Wilkinson wrote in a concurring opinion that there was no search in the geofence warrant case, citing Supreme Court rulings from the 1970s declaring that check records held by a bank and dialing records held by a phone company are not private and could be searched without a warrant.

In 2024, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit in New Orleans ruled that geofence warrants are general warrants categorically prohibited by the Fourth Amendment. The National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers argued that geofence warrants constitute unconstitutional general warrants that compelled Google to conduct fishing expeditions through millions of accounts without any basis for incriminating evidence.

"It's grab the data and search first. Suspicion later. That's opposite of how our system has worked, and it's really dangerous," said Jake Laperruque, an attorney for the Center for Democracy & Technology.

Google stored location history data for hundreds of millions of users but changed its policy in 2023 and no longer stores that data for all of its users. Cellphone carriers continue to receive warrants seeking tracking data. On July 24, 2023, reproductive rights advocates pushed for legislation to ban warrants seeking cellphone location data, which faced strong opposition from law enforcement.

On June 22, 2018, the Supreme Court ruled in a 5-4 vote that the Constitution protects cellphone tracking data and requires police to obtain a search warrant to get cell tower records showing movement over days or weeks. The ruling held that the FBI should have obtained a search warrant before requiring a cellphone company to turn over 127 days of records for Timothy Carpenter, a suspect in a series of store robberies in Michigan.