The U.S. Supreme Court agreed to decide whether the Labor Department may impose in-house monetary penalties on farms accused of violating H-2A guest worker program conditions, granting certiorari to resolve an Article III challenge that has cast doubt on the agency’s enforcement regime after the court’s 2024 ruling in SEC v. Jarkesy.
The grant, issued in the court’s April 27 order list, presents two questions: whether Article III precludes the Labor Department from adjudicating proceedings to collect monetary remedies from employers who allegedly violated the terms and conditions of employment of H-2A workers and domestic workers in corresponding employment, and whether 8 U.S.C. § 1188(g)(2) authorizes the agency to do so. Department of Labor v. Sun Valley Orchards LLC, petition for writ of certiorari filed, No. 25-966 (U.S. April 27, 2026).
The dispute stems from a Wage and Hour Division enforcement action against Sun Valley Orchards LLC, a New Jersey fruit and vegetable farm that hired 96 foreign workers alongside 51 U.S. workers to pick asparagus and peppers from April to October 2015. After a multi-day hearing, an administrative law judge and the department’s Administrative Review Board upheld findings that the farm made false promises about kitchen access, charged workers for meals and beverages without proper disclosure, fired workers before they had completed the three-fourths guarantee built into the labor-certification period, and provided substandard housing and transportation. The agency assessed $211,800 in civil penalties and $344,945.80 in back wages.
A Third Circuit panel reversed the U.S. District Court for the District of New Jersey on July 29, 2025, and ordered judgment for the farm on Article III grounds. The case, the panel wrote, is “made of the stuff of the traditional actions at common law tried by the courts at Westminster in 1789,” quoting Jarkesy. The agency’s claim, the court held, is “like a suit for breach of contract, which would have traditionally been heard in common law courts,” and the civil penalties and back wages it sought are “common law remedies.”
The panel acknowledged that “immigration is traditionally a matter of public rights” suitable for executive adjudication but concluded the case fell outside that tradition. “[R]ules about worker hours, housing, cooking, and transportation,” the Third Circuit said, concern “employment law” rather than “the admission and exclusion of aliens.”
In the petition, Solicitor General D. John Sauer wrote that the decision “incorrectly invalidates an Act of Congress” and “casts doubt on all administrative adjudications of employers’ violations of conditions of H-2A and related programs.” Adjudicating the conditions attached to an immigration benefit, Sauer argued, “involves quintessential public rights,” and the public-rights doctrine permits executive officers to assess monetary penalties for breaching the terms on which a federal privilege is granted. The petition cites Oceanic Steam Navigation Co. v. Stranahan, Lloyd Sabaudo Societa Anonima per Azioni v. Elting and Passavant v. United States, among other authorities.
The government emphasized that all nine justices in Jarkesy treated immigration and public-benefits cases as falling within the public-rights doctrine. By one estimate, the petition noted, H-2A workers account for a sixth of the U.S. agricultural workforce, and the Third Circuit ruling “deprives the government of an important tool for ensuring that employers comply with the conditions for employing those workers.”
Labor Secretary Lori Chavez-DeRemer is the named petitioner alongside the department. The case originated in a June 2016 Wage and Hour Division notice of determination, and the Administrative Review Board issued its order in May 2021.
