Fourth-Amendment

Most posts on this site are about the Supreme Court taking a right away. This one isn’t — mostly. On June 29, 2026, the Court ruled that “geofence warrants,” the increasingly common police tactic of asking Google to hand over location data for every phone that passed near a crime scene, count as a search under the Fourth Amendment. That means police actually have to get a real warrant, based on real evidence connecting a real suspect to a real crime, before casting the net. It’s a genuine win for digital privacy. It’s also a 6-3 decision, which means three sitting justices were prepared to let the practice continue unchecked — and their reasoning is worth understanding, because it’s the same reasoning that could gut this protection the next time the facts are less sympathetic. ...

On February 19, 2026, a federal judge in West Virginia released a 21-year-old Salvadoran man from immigration detention and, in doing so, produced one of the most searingly direct opinions in recent American legal history. Anderson Jesus Urquilla-Ramos had come to the United States fleeing violence in El Salvador. He had a pending asylum case. He had valid work authorization. He had a valid driver’s license. On a West Virginia highway, a traffic stop — pretextual, for a license plate cover — became the occasion for his arrest by federal agents who wore masks, carried military-style weapons, drove unmarked vehicles, and presented no warrant of any kind. ...

The Surveillance Grid You Never Voted For: Flock Cameras, ICE, and the Courts’ Failure to Catch Up Sometime in the past few years, a camera appeared on a pole near your home. You probably did not vote on it. Your city council may have approved a contract you never heard about. The company that makes the camera — a Georgia-based firm called Flock Safety — now operates an estimated 80,000 license plate readers across more than 5,000 communities in 49 states. And the data those cameras collect, recording every vehicle that passes with a timestamp and location, is being shared with Immigration and Customs Enforcement. ...