The Supreme Court is set to hear oral arguments Monday in Chatrie v. United States, a Fourth Amendment showdown over whether police can use so-called geofence warrants to sweep up the cellphone location data of potentially millions of Americans, all to find a handful of suspects near a crime scene. The case pits law enforcement's demand for a powerful investigative tool against the constitutional guarantee that the government cannot rifle through citizens' private papers without specific, individualized suspicion.

At stake is whether the Justice Department can continue compelling tech companies like Google to hand over location records for every user in a defined geographic area during a set window of time. The practice has become an increasingly common investigative technique, and federal appeals courts have split on whether it passes constitutional muster. A decision is expected by the end of June.

Arguments will begin at 10 a.m. Monday during the final scheduled week of oral arguments for the term. For anyone who cares about the Fourth Amendment, and every conservative who has ever worried about government overreach, this is a case worth watching closely.

The bank robbery that started it all

The case traces back to a bank robbery investigation in suburban Richmond, Virginia, in 2019. Police served a geofence warrant on Google seeking location data for devices near the credit union at the time of the crime. That data connected Okello Chatrie to the robbery. He was arrested and ultimately convicted.

But a federal judge found the search violated Chatrie's rights, then allowed the evidence anyway. That contradiction helped push the case upward through the federal courts, where it now lands on the highest bench in the country.

The question before the justices is not whether Chatrie robbed the bank. It is whether the government's method of finding him was constitutional in the first place.

How geofence warrants work, and why they matter

A geofence warrant does not target a specific suspect. It targets a location. Law enforcement draws a virtual boundary around a crime scene and a time window, then compels a technology company to produce records showing which devices were present. The DOJ's brief described a three-step process overseen by a magistrate judge, designed to narrow the data before individual users are identified.

The Justice Department urged the justices to uphold the practice, arguing that no constitutional violation flows from the discovery of "two hours of public movements." In its brief, the DOJ leaned on the legal concept of assumed risk:

"The Court has made clear that an individual lacks a reasonable expectation of privacy in information that he 'assumed the risk' of sharing with others, including about his short-term public movements."

The government further argued that the warrant in Chatrie's case "sought movement information visible to anyone near petitioner when he robbed the credit union, and the inquiry it specified was closely analogous to what Google itself regularly did with opting-in users' recorded Location History."

In other words, the DOJ's position is straightforward: if you shared your location with Google voluntarily, you cannot claim the government violated your privacy by asking Google for it.

Chatrie's Fourth Amendment challenge

Chatrie's legal team sees it very differently. His brief warned the Court that geofence warrants allow the government to "search first and develop suspicions later." That framing goes to the heart of the Fourth Amendment's purpose, preventing the kind of general warrants the Founders despised.

The Supreme Court has recently grappled with the limits of police authority in a variety of contexts. But geofence warrants raise a distinct problem: they do not name a suspect. They cast a digital dragnet across an entire population of device users.

Chatrie's brief laid out the scope in stark terms:

"To find the few people near a crime scene, the government compels a search of every account with Location History enabled, millions of people, all over the country, whose private digital papers must be searched so that the government can identify who was where and when."

And the brief did not stop there. It warned of the tool's potential for abuse beyond ordinary criminal investigations:

"The potential for abuse is breathtaking: the government need only draw a geofence around a church, a political rally, or a gun shop, and it can compel a search of every user's records to learn who was there. The Fourth Amendment was adopted to ensure that the government could never wield such power."

That passage should give every conservative pause. A government that can demand the digital footprint of everyone near a gun shop or a church rally is not a government operating within the bounds the Founders intended.

Google's unusual position

Google, the company that actually holds the location data, filed a brief in the case, but did not take a side. Instead, Google urged the Supreme Court "to hold that Google Location History and other similar digital documents stored remotely deserve the Fourth Amendment's protection."

The company warned of what happens if the Court rules otherwise:

"A contrary rule would leave the intimate details of millions of Americans' daily lives, data that will exist in many forms as technology rapidly develops, exposed to warrantless surveillance."

Google's stance is notable. The company profits enormously from collecting location data. Yet even Google recognizes that a ruling stripping Fourth Amendment protection from remotely stored digital records would open a door that cannot easily be closed. The current Court faces no shortage of institutional pressures, but this case demands clear constitutional reasoning above all else.

The DOJ pushes back hard

The Justice Department's brief also took direct aim at Chatrie's legal theory. The DOJ argued that his position would "seem to imply that no geofence warrant, of any sort, could ever be executed." The government framed that outcome as extreme and unworkable.

The DOJ brief went further, cautioning the justices against moving too fast on unsettled digital-privacy questions:

"His path to that counterintuitive result requires a number of novel Fourth Amendment innovations and would push the Court far out ahead of legislatures and common-law courts, where complex issues, such as questions about ownership of personal data, contract law on the Internet, and the proper boundary lines of online privacy, are still being debated and developed."

That argument has some force. Courts generally prefer to let legislatures take the lead on complex policy questions. But the Fourth Amendment is not a policy preference, it is a constitutional command. And the Supreme Court did not wait for Congress in 2018 when it decided Carpenter v. United States, ruling that law enforcement must show probable cause to obtain cell phone tower data as part of an investigation.

Carpenter established that digital-age surveillance tools can implicate constitutional rights even when users technically share data with third parties. Chatrie asks whether that principle extends to the far broader sweep of geofence warrants, warrants that search not one suspect's records, but the records of millions.

A busy final week at the Court

The geofence case is not the only high-profile matter before the justices this week. Immediately after Monday's Chatrie arguments, the Court will hear a case involving Bayer, the maker of RoundUp weedkiller. On Wednesday, the final argument day of the term, the justices will take up whether the Trump administration may end temporary protected status for Haiti and Syria.

The composition of the current Court will shape these outcomes for years. But Chatrie stands apart because its implications reach every American who carries a smartphone, which is to say, nearly all of us.

The question is not whether police should have effective tools to solve crimes. Of course they should. The question is whether the Constitution permits the government to search the private digital records of millions of innocent people on the chance that one of them committed a crime. Federal appeals courts have already split on the answer, and the Supreme Court's decision will settle the matter.

Conservatives who rightly distrust government overreach, who have watched federal agencies expand their authority over policing and identification, should pay close attention to how the justices handle this one. A tool that can sweep up the location records of every churchgoer, every gun-show attendee, and every rally participant is not a scalpel. It is a general warrant wearing a digital disguise.

The Founders wrote the Fourth Amendment for exactly this kind of moment. The Court should honor it.