The Immigration and Nationality Act allows employers to hire temporary farmworkers from other countries under the H-2A program. The Department of Labor (DOL) closely supervises the benefits, wages, and working conditions that employers offer to H-2A workers, and federal law authorizes DOL to impose penalties to enforce employer compliance. Sun Valley Orchards was a beneficiary of the government’s H-2A program and used H-2A workers at its New Jersey farm. After an investigation into the working conditions at Sun Valley, DOL found that Sun Valley had violated the H-2A regulations by, among other things, providing substandard housing and transportation, pressuring workers to waive their rights under the H-2A program, and failing to pay workers the wages that they were contractually promised. After DOL assessed civil monetary penalties and back wages, Sun Valley sued, claiming that DOL had adjudicated its rights without a jury in violation of the Constitution. The district court dismissed Sun Valley’s claims, but the Third Circuit reversed. DOL asked the Supreme Court to hear the case, and it agreed to do so.

In June 2026, CAC filed an amicus brief in the Supreme Court explaining why the program is constitutional.

In SEC v. Jarkesy, the Supreme Court held that when the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) seeks civil penalties against a defendant for securities fraud, the Seventh Amendment entitles the defendant to a jury trial. But the Court made clear that there are “some contexts” in which what the Court has called the “public rights doctrine” applies. In those contexts, the government may seek traditional legal remedies and civil penalties in administrative tribunals.

Our brief explains why the public rights doctrine applies here. As the Court explained in Jarkesy, “public rights” concern matters that historically could have been determined exclusively by the executive and legislative branches. Put another way, the public rights doctrine applies when the government’s power in an area is so total that no party has a “vested right” to act in that area without the government’s approval.

That is the case here. As Congress made clear when creating the H-2A program, that program distributes valuable government benefits to private employers. And it controls this area of the law entirely: the law that created the H-2A program also created civil and criminal penalties for hiring noncitizen workers outside of the H-2A program. From the beginning, lawmakers saw participation in the H-2A program as a “government subsidy” for agricultural employers and required that this subsidy only be distributed when certain conditions were met.

Furthermore, the Supreme Court has explained that where participation in a program is voluntary, there is no “purely ‘private’ right” at issue in the first place. Here, no agricultural employer is required to hire foreign workers, but if they choose to do so, they must comply with the government’s regulations to protect both foreign and domestic workers.