There is a kind of police request that does not start with a suspect. It starts with a place and a time, and asks a technology company to say who was there.
It is called a geofence warrant, and on June 29, 2026, the Supreme Court held for the first time that obtaining the resulting location data is a Fourth Amendment search.
Minnesota reached that conclusion in 2014. It is written into our statutes. Most people in this state — including, I suspect, a fair number of lawyers — have no idea it is there.
What happened in Chatrie
On May 20, 2019, a man robbed a credit union in Midlothian, Virginia. Investigators learned from witnesses and surveillance footage that he had approached from the corner of an adjacent church and appeared to be talking on a cell phone. Then the trail went cold.
Three and a half weeks later, police applied to a Virginia magistrate for a warrant directed not at any person but at Google. It sought data about 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 records a user’s position roughly every two minutes.
The warrant described 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, whose data showed him entering the geofence about ten minutes before the robbery and heading toward a residential area immediately after leaving the bank. He was charged federally and moved to suppress.
The procedural history is remarkable. The district court found that the warrant “plainly violates the rights enshrined in [the Fourth] Amendment” — but denied suppression on good faith. A Fourth Circuit panel affirmed on entirely different reasoning, holding there was 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 evenly on whether a search had occurred, and affirmed in a one-sentence per curiam.
The Supreme Court granted review on that single 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.
The doctrinal move is an extension of Carpenter v. United States, 585 U.S. 296 (2018), which held that acquiring historical cell-site location information is a search. Carpenter involved records held by a phone carrier over 127 days. Chatrie involved a far shorter window, data held by an app company rather than a carrier, and a request that began with no suspect at all — and the Court held it was a search anyway.
Note carefully what the decision does not say. It does not say geofence warrants are unconstitutional. It says obtaining the data is a search, which means it requires a warrant supported by probable cause and particularity. Whether this warrant satisfied those requirements, and what should happen to the evidence, went back down.
Minnesota answered this in 2014
Now 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. The warrant runs for no more than 60 days, or the time necessary to achieve its objective. The statute carves out five exceptions, all of the sort you would expect: a device reported lost or stolen by its owner, a call for emergency services, informed and documented consent, consent of a guardian or next of kin where the user is missing or believed deceased, and an emergency involving risk of death or serious physical harm.
Two features deserve attention.
First, 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 is the geofence problem in advance. The core defense of geofence warrants has always been that step one produces only anonymized device identifiers — no names, no accounts, just strings. Minnesota’s statute does not care. It covers the location information of a unique identifier, which is precisely what an anonymized Google device ID is.
Second, Minnesota built in transparency. Judges must 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 does not merely regulate this surveillance. It counts it, in public, on a schedule.
Twelve years before Chatrie, and four years before Carpenter, the Minnesota Legislature decided that police need a warrant 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, there are now two independent questions, not one. Was the Fourth Amendment satisfied under Chatrie and Carpenter? And separately, was § 626A.42 complied with — 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 are different things, and what follows from a violation of each is litigated separately. Both are worth asking about.
For federal cases in Minnesota: § 626A.42 binds a “government entity.” Federal agents operating here answer to the Fourth Amendment, and after Chatrie that means a warrant for location data. A Minnesota statute does not add obligations to a federal investigation.
For everyone else: the practical exposure is not really about robbery investigations. It is that a great many ordinary phones are generating a position record every couple of minutes, indefinitely, held by companies that can be served with legal process. Chatrie is a meaningful holding — it forecloses the argument that you surrender constitutional protection simply by using a service that logs where you are. It is not a substitute for knowing what your own devices retain.
The dissents are not frivolous
Three justices disagreed, and their concern is a real one. A geofence warrant does not begin with a suspect; it begins with a crime scene. It is, in that respect, closer to canvassing a neighborhood than to searching a house — and canvassing a neighborhood has never required a warrant.
The answer the majority gave, in substance, is that the scale changes the character of the thing. An officer knocking on doors gets what people choose to tell him. A geofence request gets an exact, timestamped, retrospective record of everyone who happened to be near a place — churchgoers, commuters, people in adjacent apartments — with no ability to decline and no notice that it happened. Carpenter’s phrase for the underlying worry is “a too permeating police surveillance,” borrowed from a 1948 case, and it does more work every year.
Minnesota resolved that debate legislatively in 2014, which is worth saying plainly. When people ask what a state legislature can usefully do about surveillance technology while the courts work it out, this is the example. Minnesota did not wait for the Supreme Court, and Minnesota did not get it wrong.
If you are facing a criminal matter involving cell-phone location data, or you have questions about what your own devices are recording and who can obtain 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; Carpenter v. United States, 585 U.S. 296 (2018); Minn. Stat. § 626A.42 (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.