Some police requests don’t start with a suspect. They start with a place and a time, and they ask a tech company to say who was there.
That’s a geofence warrant. On June 29, 2026, the Supreme Court held for the first time that getting the location data that comes back is a Fourth Amendment search.
Minnesota got there in 2014. It’s written into our statutes. Most people in this state — and I’d bet a fair number of lawyers — have no idea it’s there.
What happened in Chatrie
On May 20, 2019, a man robbed a credit union in Midlothian, Virginia. Witnesses and surveillance footage told investigators he’d come from the corner of a church next door and seemed to be talking on a cell phone. Then the trail went cold.
Three and a half weeks later, police asked a Virginia magistrate for a warrant aimed not at any person but at Google. It sought data on every cell phone inside a 150-meter radius of the credit union around the time of the robbery. The application explained that Google’s Location History service logs a user’s position roughly every two minutes.
The warrant laid out three steps:
- Google would produce anonymized location data for all phones inside the geofence from 30 minutes before to 30 minutes after the robbery.
- Officers would narrow the list, and Google would produce additional anonymized data for those devices — including locations outside the geofence — across a two-hour window.
- Officers would narrow again, and Google would hand over names and phone numbers.
Three people came out the other end. One was Okello Chatrie. His data showed him entering the geofence about ten minutes before the robbery and heading toward a residential area right after leaving the bank. He was charged federally and moved to suppress.
What happened next is a mess. The district court found that the warrant “plainly violates the rights enshrined in [the Fourth] Amendment” — and then denied suppression on good faith anyway. A Fourth Circuit panel affirmed for a completely different reason: no search at all, because Chatrie had no reasonable expectation of privacy in two hours of location data “voluntarily exposed to Google.” The full Fourth Circuit took the case en banc, split down the middle on whether there’d been a search, and affirmed in a one-sentence per curiam.
The Supreme Court took that one question and answered it:
Police officers conducted a Fourth Amendment search when they acquired Chatrie’s location data from Google because an individual has a reasonable expectation of privacy in his cell-phone location information.
Justice Kagan wrote, joined by the Chief Justice and Justices Sotomayor, Kavanaugh, and Jackson. Justice Jackson concurred separately, joined by Justice Sotomayor. Justice Gorsuch concurred in the judgment. Justices Alito and Barrett each dissented, with Justice Thomas joining part of Justice Alito’s opinion. The judgment below was vacated and remanded.
This builds on Carpenter v. United States, 585 U.S. 296 (2018), which held that getting historical cell-site location information is a search. Carpenter was about records a phone carrier held over 127 days. Chatrie was about a much shorter window, data held by an app company instead of a carrier, and a request that started with no suspect at all. The Court called it a search anyway.
Now, what the decision does and does not say. It doesn’t say geofence warrants are unconstitutional. It says getting the data is a search, which generally means it needs a warrant backed by probable cause and particularity — and the Court was careful to say that exigent circumstances can still justify going without one. Whether this warrant met those requirements, and what happens to the evidence, went back down.
Minnesota answered this in 2014
Here’s the part that should interest anyone practicing or living here.
Minn. Stat. § 626A.42, enacted in 2014 and amended in 2020, says this:
A government entity may not obtain the location information of an electronic device or unique identifier without a tracking warrant.
A tracking warrant issues only on a showing of probable cause that the person possessing the device, or using the identifier, is committing, has committed, or is about to commit a crime. A warrant for real-time collection runs for no more than 60 days or the time necessary to achieve its objective, whichever is less. The statute carves out five exceptions, all the kind you’d expect: a device reported lost or stolen by its owner, a call for emergency services, informed, affirmative, documented consent, consent of a guardian or next of kin where the user is believed deceased or reported missing and can’t be contacted, and an emergency involving risk of death or serious physical harm.
Two pieces of it stand out.
The definitions reach further than “your phone.” An “electronic device” is any device enabling access to an electronic communication service, remote computing service, or location information service. And a “unique identifier” is “any numeric or alphanumeric string that is associated with a single entity or account within a given electronic communication application or service.”
That second definition saw the geofence problem coming. The main defense of geofence warrants has always been that step one only turns up anonymized device identifiers — no names, no accounts, just strings. Minnesota’s statute doesn’t care. It covers the location information of a unique identifier, and that’s exactly what an anonymized Google device ID is.
Minnesota also built in transparency. Judges have to report tracking-warrant data to the state court administrator — whether warrants were granted, modified, or denied — and the administrator delivers a public report to the Legislature by November 15 of each even-numbered year. Minnesota doesn’t just regulate this kind of surveillance. It counts it, in public, on a schedule.
Twelve years before Chatrie, and four years before Carpenter, the Minnesota Legislature decided police need a warrant, outside five listed exceptions, to find out where a device has been. The Supreme Court has now caught up to the constitutional floor. Minnesota built the floor higher, and built it first.
What this means in practice
For anyone facing a Minnesota state prosecution: if location data is part of the case, you now have two separate questions, not one. Was the Fourth Amendment satisfied under Chatrie and Carpenter? And separately, was § 626A.42 followed — was there a tracking warrant, was it supported by probable cause as to a person, did it stay within its authorized period? A statutory command and a constitutional command aren’t the same thing, and what follows from violating each one gets litigated separately. I’d ask about both.
For federal cases in Minnesota: § 626A.42 binds a “government entity.” Federal agents working here answer to the Fourth Amendment, and after Chatrie that generally means a warrant for location data. A Minnesota statute doesn’t add obligations to a federal investigation.
For everyone else: the real exposure isn’t about robbery investigations. It’s that a huge number of ordinary phones are logging a position every couple of minutes, indefinitely, held by companies that can be served with legal process. Chatrie matters. It shuts down the argument that you give up constitutional protection just by using a service that logs where you are. It’s no substitute for knowing what your own devices keep.
The dissents aren’t frivolous
Three justices disagreed, and their worry is a real one. A geofence warrant doesn’t start with a suspect. It starts with a crime scene. In that way it looks more like canvassing a neighborhood than searching a house — and canvassing a neighborhood has never needed a warrant.
The majority’s answer, boiled down, is that scale changes what the thing is. An officer knocking on doors gets what people choose to tell him. A geofence request gets an exact, timestamped look back at everyone who happened to be near a place — churchgoers, commuters, people in the apartments next door — with no way to say no and no notice that it happened. Carpenter’s phrase for the worry underneath all this is “a too permeating police surveillance,” borrowed from a 1948 case, and that phrase does more work every year.
In 2014, Minnesota settled that debate in the Legislature. When people ask what a state legislature can actually do about surveillance technology while the courts sort it out, this is the example. Minnesota didn’t wait for the Supreme Court, and Minnesota didn’t get it wrong.
If you’re facing a criminal matter involving cell-phone location data, or you have questions about what your own devices are recording and who can get it, send us a message or call 612-470-6529.
Sources: Chatrie v. United States, 609 U. S. ___ (2026) (Kagan, J.), No. 25–112, decided June 29, 2026 (slip op., at 29 & n. 11, on the warrant requirement and the exigent-circumstances exception); Carpenter v. United States, 585 U.S. 296 (2018); Minn. Stat. § 626A.42, subds. 1 (definitions), 2 (tracking warrant required; the five exceptions in subd. 2(b)), 3 (the 60-day limit, which subd. 3(c) applies only to contemporaneous collection), and 5 (reporting) (enacted 2014 c 278 s 2, amended 2020 c 82). This article is general commentary on published decisions and Minnesota statutes, not legal advice, and reading it does not create an attorney–client relationship. Whether any particular search or warrant was lawful depends on facts specific to that case. No outcome is promised or implied.