The Supreme Court heard the case of two brothers whose family farm closed after a $550,000 Labor Department bill. They say only a real court can make them pay that money.
Story Snapshot
- Joe and Russell Marino ran Sun Valley Orchards, a fourth-generation farm in South Jersey that closed in 2022.
- Labor Department officials, with no jury and no regular court, ordered the farm to pay more than $550,000.
- The justices heard the farm’s case on Tuesday, November 10, and a ruling is expected by June 2027.
- The government says Congress gave the agency this power to enforce a farm worker visa program.
- The Marinos never got a jury, and in July 2025 a federal appeals court ruled the farm had a right to have its case decided by a regular federal court.
A Family Farm’s Long Fight
On Tuesday, November 10, the Supreme Court heard the case of Sun Valley Orchards, a farm near Swedesboro in Gloucester County, New Jersey. Brothers Joe and Russell Marino ran the farm, which their family had worked for four generations. It grew peaches, peppers, squash and other vegetables and hired about 150 seasonal workers a year. The farm stopped operating in 2022, and its lawyers say the Labor Department’s bill and the decade-long fight helped put it out of business. The Marinos say the agency never should have been the one to decide what they owed.
“I never thought honesty and facts wouldn’t matter in America, but that’s what happened,” Joe Marino has said. “We were presumed guilty from the start, and it’s shameful what they did to us.”
What The Labor Department Said The Farm Did
In 2015, the farm signed up for H-2A, a visa program that lets farms bring in foreign workers for the season, after it had trouble finding local help. In early 2016, Labor Department officials said the farm broke the program’s rules. They said it housed workers in unsanitary conditions, drove them in unsafe vans with unlicensed drivers, fired some workers mid-season and wrongly took money out of pay for food and drinks. The Marinos deny it. They say the workers who left early chose to quit.
According to the farm’s lawyers, more than $320,000 of the bill came from a single charge: a meal plan of about $75 a week that a consultant left off the farm’s job paperwork. The farm says the meal plan was legal and that no worker was harmed. The total included back wages owed to 147 workers, 96 of them on H-2A visas.
Judged Inside The Agency
The Marinos never got a jury. Their case was heard by an administrative law judge, a judge employed by the Labor Department. After a four-day hearing, the judge ordered the farm to pay $556,745.80 in back wages and penalties. The department’s review board, chosen by the Secretary of Labor, agreed in 2021. “DOL made certain nobody outside the four walls of the agency could hear the facts and evidence,” Joe Marino has said.
The farm took the fight to federal court. In July 2025, the federal appeals court in Philadelphia ruled unanimously that the farm had a right to have its case decided by a regular federal court. The government appealed to the Supreme Court, which agreed in April to hear it.
The Question For The Justices
The Court is deciding two things. Does the Constitution let a federal agency, instead of a court, decide cases that seek money from farms in the H-2A program? And does the law Congress wrote give the Labor Department that power in the first place? The farm’s lawyers, from the Institute for Justice, a public interest law firm, point to a 2024 Supreme Court ruling that said people facing civil penalties for fraud have a right to a jury trial in federal court.
The government says the H-2A program is tied to immigration and that hiring foreign workers is a privilege the government grants, so the agency may decide these disputes on its own. It also says Congress let the agency seek “appropriate penalties” to keep farms in line with the program’s terms. Joe Marino has said what he wants from the fight: “I don’t want this to ever, ever happen to another farmer or small business owner or American.”
Sources:
regionalmedianews.com, supremecourt.gov, law.cornell.edu, dol.gov, reuters.com
