The ink is barely dry on a Supreme Court ruling about geofence warrants, but that is not deterring the Justice Department. On September 3, 2026, the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of Mississippi filed a notice of appeal to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, challenging a magistrate judge’s and a district judge’s refusal to authorize proposed cell-tower dump warrants.
A cell tower dump is a record of every device connected to a specific cell tower during a certain time. The appeal concerns whether the requested tower dumps are Fourth Amendment searches and, if so, whether these applications satisfy probable cause and particularity. Put plainly, the appeal will ask a basic privacy question: Can law enforcement collect location records for every phone that connected to certain cell towers near a crime scene, even when most of those phone owners are not suspects?
Expanding on SCOTUS Precedent?
On June 29, less than three months ago, the Supreme Court of the United States (SCOTUS) issued a ruling in Chatrie v. United States. There, the Supreme Court held that police conduct a Fourth Amendment search when they obtain a person’s Google Location History through a geofence warrant.
The appeal may become an early test of how far Chatrie’s privacy reasoning extends beyond geofence warrants to tower dumps. Are such warrants unconstitutional as a violation of a person’s reasonable expectation of privacy? Depending on how the Fifth Circuit rules, the fight over cell tower dump warrants may make another appearance before SCOTUS in the not-too-distant future.
In brief, here’s what happened in Chatrie. In May 2019, a credit union in Virginia was robbed. Based on witness accounts and surveillance footage, police believed a male suspect who was talking on a cell phone was the perpetrator, but they had no immediate success identifying him. On June 14, authorities applied for a “geofence warrant,” a three-step process. If granted, the first step would allow them to receive anonymized location data from Google for all cell phones in that area during a specified period before and after the robbery. After the police narrowed the list, Google would turn over more anonymized data. In the final step, the list would be further whittled down, at which point Google would turn over identifying information, including names and phone numbers, for those still on the suspect list. Given that the process functions in the opposite way that most police investigations do, they’re sometimes referred to as “reverse warrants.”
Using this process, the police arrested Okello Chatrie and charged him with robbery and other firearms charges. Chatrie moved to suppress the evidence gathered through the geofence warrant, claiming the search was invalid and per se unconstitutional under the Fourth Amendment. The federal district court agreed it was a violation but denied the motion under the good-faith exception to the exclusionary rule, which can keep evidence from being suppressed when officers reasonably rely on a warrant later found invalid. The Fourth Circuit affirmed, but on different grounds, holding that no search occurred because Chatrie had no expectation of privacy in information he shared with Google.
The Supreme Court disagreed. SCOTUS held 6–3 that police conducted a Fourth Amendment search by obtaining Chatrie’s Google Location History. Building on Carpenter v. United States, which addressed historical cell-site location information, or CSLI, the Court concluded that Location History can reveal an even more detailed record of a person’s movements. In Carpenter, the Court warned that CSLI can give police an “intimate window” into a person’s life by reconstructing where they have been. In Chatrie, the Court found that Google Location History can be even more revealing because it may log a phone’s location about every two minutes and, in some settings, locate it within roughly 20 meters. The Supreme Court did not decide whether the three-stage warrant satisfied the Fourth Amendment’s probable-cause and particularity requirements. It sent the case back to the Fourth Circuit to evaluate each stage of the process and left the lower court to reconsider whether the good-faith exception to the exclusionary rule applies.
But What About Tower Dumps?
Law enforcement has been investigating a series of violent crimes that were committed in Jackson, Mississippi. On August 5, 2026, U.S. District Judge Carlton Reeves upheld a magistrate judge’s refusal to issue the government’s proposed tower-dump warrants in the Jackson investigation. Noting that there was no way the Founding Fathers could even have imagined the scope of surveillance provided by tracking electronic devices, Reeves held that tower dumps are per se unconstitutional under the Fourth Amendment and denied the government’s bid to reverse the magistrate judge’s refusal to issue the requested warrants.
Can You Hear/See/Track Me Now?
Given the past usefulness of cell tower dumps for law enforcement investigations, it’s not surprising that the DOJ chose to appeal the Southern Mississippi tower dump rulings. How they’ll fare against the recent Chatrie decision remains to be seen, as will how wide or narrow a scope they use to apply it.
The core of the appeal — invasion of privacy versus using technology to capture dangerous criminals — is likely to draw staunch support from both sides. Even if the country doesn't need another bitterly divisive issue right now, it may still get one.
