Dominguez Reyes: The Forfeiture Order That Proved the $10,000

The order named one defendant and gave one number: “at least $3,934,518.”

Cleto Marte Dominguez Reyes, a citizen of the Dominican Republic and a lawful permanent resident of the United States, pleaded guilty in federal court in Florida to one count of conspiring to launder money. Under immigration law, money laundering is an “aggravated felony” only “if the amount of the funds exceeded $10,000.” He argued that the documents recording his guilty plea did not establish that he had pleaded guilty to laundering that much. The government pointed to the forfeiture order entered in his criminal case.

The Board of Immigration Appeals sided with the government in Matter of Cleto Marte Dominguez Reyes, 28 I&N Dec. 878 (BIA 2024), a published decision issued December 13, 2024, by a three-member panel with no separate opinion. The Board held that “the circumstance-specific approach applies to the requirement that the ‘amount of the funds exceeded $10,000.’” That means an immigration judge may look past the plea papers to what actually happened. On this record, the Board found the forfeiture order sufficient. It dismissed the appeal, which left him removable and ineligible for cancellation of removal. The Fifth Circuit then denied his petition for review on November 6, 2025.

For a Californian, the approach itself is not new. The Ninth Circuit adopted it in 2015. What matters here is the proof: A forfeiture order can supply a dollar figure when the plea papers do not. But Ninth Circuit decisions also limit which number counts and which court papers can prove it.

The fight over the missing dollar figure

Dominguez Reyes pleaded guilty on February 9, 2022, to a single count under 18 U.S.C. § 1956(h), the federal money-laundering conspiracy statute. The Board gives June 14, 2022, as the date of conviction. A forfeiture order was attached to the judgment. Criminal forfeiture is a penalty that takes from a defendant money or property connected to the crime. This order, from the Middle District of Florida, read that “at least $3,934,518 was obtained and laundered by the defendant as a result of his participation in the money laundering conspiracy, for which he has pled guilty.”

In October 2023, the Department of Homeland Security, or DHS, began removal proceedings, which are the immigration-court cases that decide whether a noncitizen must leave. It charged him as removable under 8 U.S.C. § 1227(a)(2)(A)(iii) for an aggravated felony as defined in § 1101(a)(43)(D), the money-laundering part of the definition. The label is severe. A permanent resident convicted of an aggravated felony is deportable, and 8 U.S.C. § 1229b(a)(3) bars cancellation of removal, the relief that can let a long-time permanent resident keep that status. DHS filed the indictment, the presentence report and the judgment with its attached forfeiture order. A presentence report is the probation office’s account of the crime and the defendant, prepared for the sentencing judge. The immigration judge found him removable and ineligible for cancellation.

DHS had to prove the aggravated felony by “clear and convincing” evidence, the demanding civil standard set by 8 U.S.C. § 1229a(c)(3)(A). On appeal, one part of the definition was not disputed: A conspiracy under § 1956(h) is “an offense described in section 1956.” The dispute was the money. As the Fifth Circuit recounts, he told the Board that “the charging document, plea agreement, or judgment of conviction” had no specific findings on the amount laundered.

The $10,000 describes what happened, not what the crime requires

Immigration courts usually decide whether a conviction fits a removal ground by the “categorical approach.” They compare what the criminal statute required the prosecution to prove with the federal definition, and they ignore what the person actually did. When a statute lists alternative crimes, a variant called the modified categorical approach allows a look at a short list of court records to see which alternative was the basis of the conviction. Those are often called Shepard documents, after Shepard v. United States, 544 U.S. 13 (2005), and they include the charging document, the plea agreement and the plea hearing. Dominguez Reyes’s argument depended on that short list.

The Supreme Court drew the governing line in Nijhawan v. Holder, 557 U.S. 29 (2009), a fraud case. Some parts of the aggravated-felony definition describe kinds of crimes. Others describe “the particular circumstances in which an offender committed the crime on a particular occasion.” For those, the judge looks at the facts. Nijhawan put the fraud definition’s $10,000 victim-loss requirement in the second group.

The Board gave three reasons for treating the money-laundering threshold the same way. First, the words: Whether the funds exceeded $10,000 “does not refer to a generic category of crimes or indeed any crime at all.” Second, the consequence. Section 1956 has no $10,000 threshold for criminal liability, so under a categorical approach “no conviction under 18 U.S.C. § 1956 would ever be an aggravated felony,” even though Congress named that statute. Third, the money-laundering threshold parallels the fraud threshold Nijhawan had already resolved.

The Ninth Circuit had given the same answer in Fuentes v. Lynch, No. 11-73131, 788 F.3d 1177, 1180–81 (9th Cir. June 10, 2015) (per curiam), and it faced two complications along the way. Section 1956 mentions $10,000 only in its provision on jurisdiction over conduct abroad. And the neighboring statute, § 1957, does have a $10,000 element. The court held that treating the threshold as an element because of § 1957 would read § 1956 out of the immigration statute. The Board cited Fuentes and reached the same place.

A forfeiture order supplied the number

Once the threshold turns on circumstances, the short list stops controlling. “We are not limited to the plea agreement or other Shepard documents,” the Board wrote. Nijhawan explains why: That list was built to identify which crime a person was convicted of, and the Court required instead “fundamentally fair procedures,” including “a fair opportunity to dispute” the government’s claim.

The Board had already taken the next step in Matter of F-R-A-, 28 I&N Dec. 460 (BIA 2022), a wire-fraud conspiracy case arising in the Ninth Circuit. There it held that forfeiture, like restitution (money that compensates victims), may be considered to determine victim loss “if the proceeds received are sufficiently tethered and traceable to the conduct of conviction.” Dominguez Reyes carries that test from fraud losses to laundered funds.

Two features of the order met it. The order tied the money to the crime of conviction: the conspiracy “for which he has pled guilty.” And it tied the money to him. He argued that the amount had been applied broadly to all codefendants. The Board answered from the document: “He is the only defendant named on the forfeiture order,” which identified the amount attributable to his own conduct. The figure was therefore “sufficiently tethered,” and not “based on acquitted or dismissed counts or general conduct.”

That last phrase has a history a careful reader should know. In Nijhawan, the words appear in the Court’s description of a Third Circuit case, offered in support of the government’s own statement that the loss must “be tied to the specific counts covered by the conviction.” The Ninth Circuit treats the point as binding. In Khalulyan v. Garland, No. 21-70909, 63 F.4th 1207, 1212 (9th Cir. Mar. 30, 2023), the court said the Supreme Court “has instructed” that rule.

A harder objection is the standard of proof. Findings made at sentencing may rest on a lesser standard than the clear and convincing evidence DHS needs. The Board’s opinion answers the general attack on forfeiture orders by pointing to Nijhawan’s use of a restitution order and to F-R-A-, without discussing that gap. Dominguez Reyes pressed it in the Fifth Circuit, arguing that the order rested only on a preponderance of the evidence, meaning more likely than not. The court followed Matter of Babaisakov, 24 I&N Dec. 306, 319–20 (BIA 2007), which says restitution orders “must be assessed with an eye to what losses are covered and to the burden of proof employed” but can still suffice, and applied that reasoning to the forfeiture order. As the Fifth Circuit describes it, the Second Circuit had applied the same reasoning to a $120,000 forfeiture order in a laundering conspiracy case, Barikyan v. Barr, 917 F.3d 142 (2d Cir. 2019).

The Fifth Circuit noted that Dominguez Reyes had not contested the order in his criminal case or shown an error there, and that the amount was 390 times the threshold. Those were part of how it applied the rule. The holding itself is limited to an order entered against one person that finds a specific amount attributable to the conviction: “an unrebutted forfeiture order entered solely against an alien that finds a specific amount of laundered funds attributable to the alien’s conduct of conviction can constitute clear and convincing evidence of the amount of funds required to be proven during a § 1101(a)(43)(D) circumstance-specific inquiry.”

Two smaller arguments failed on the papers

Dominguez Reyes also said the conviction records were uncertified. They came with a sworn statement by a DHS officer attesting that they were true copies of the district court’s electronic records and identifying the repository they came from. The Board held that the statute and regulation allow records submitted that way, citing 8 U.S.C. § 1229a(c)(3)(C)(ii) and 8 C.F.R. § 1003.41(b). In a footnote, it rejected his reading of its 1980 decision in Matter of Ramirez-Sanchez, 17 I&N Dec. 503, which it said “does not address removability based on criminal convictions at all.”

In the Ninth Circuit, the objection faces a similar obstacle. In Sinotes-Cruz v. Gonzales, No. 04-70745, 468 F.3d 1190, 1196–97 (9th Cir. Nov. 22, 2006), faxed Arizona records carried an immigration officer’s certification but no state official’s. The Ninth Circuit still upheld reliance on them. It said the electronic-records provision “establishes the maximum standard for authentication of electronically transmitted records of conviction, but it does not establish a minimum standard.” The records must still be shown to be what they claim to be, and the court noted that no one had objected in immigration court.

The second argument relied on a quotation. He said Nijhawan makes “scale and sophistication” relevant. The Board replied that “we cannot locate the purportedly quoted language in Nijhawan, nor can we find any similar sentiment using different words.” Neither “scale” nor “sophistication” appears in the Court’s opinion. And even if that were the test, the Board was “at a loss for how at least $3,934,518 would not be considered large-scale money laundering.”

In California, the number must be laundered funds

The Board’s opinion once calls the $3.9 million “the loss amount,” the language of the fraud cases. In the Ninth Circuit, that difference has decided a case.

Jamalur Rashid Chowdhury pleaded guilty to laundering a single check for $1,310 as part of an insurance-fraud scheme. He also pleaded to a broader conspiracy, but that conviction was not charged as the ground for removal. He was ordered to pay $967,753 in restitution. The immigration judge used that order to meet the $10,000 threshold, and the Board agreed. The Ninth Circuit granted his petition in Chowdhury v. INS, No. 99-71159, 249 F.3d 970, 973–74 (9th Cir. May 14, 2001). The phrase “amount of the funds,” it held, means the money laundered: “The statute does not mention the loss to the victim or the total proceeds of the criminal activity.” The harm of laundering is hiding money, the court explained, so the measure is how much was hidden. Fuentes, decided after Nijhawan, cited Chowdhury for that point.

The Fifth Circuit also rejected personal profit as the measure. Dominguez Reyes told the Fifth Circuit that his presentence report showed he “did not personally handle more than $10,000,” and the report recorded his denial that the crime netted him more than that. The court answered that the statute “refers to the amount of funds involved in the offense of conviction, not the amount by which the alien personally profited.” In our reading, Chowdhury’s focus on how much money was hidden points the same way.

So the words of the order matter. F-R-A-, quoting a Tenth Circuit decision, explains that “restitution is calculated based on the victim’s loss, while forfeiture is based on the offender’s gain.” That describes forfeiture of proceeds, as in that fraud case. For a section 1956 conviction, 18 U.S.C. § 982(a)(1) reaches property “involved in” the offense, which sits closer to funds laundered, so read which statute the order rests on. This order said the money was “obtained and laundered by the defendant” (our emphasis). In our reading, a California respondent, the person facing removal, who has an order that speaks only of proceeds or victim loss has a Chowdhury argument that Dominguez Reyes’s order did not leave him.

What the Ninth Circuit adds about pleas and conspiracies

Ninth Circuit decisions add three points about the proof in a California case, and they cut in different directions.

A plea does not admit everything in the indictment. Maria Arce Fuentes pleaded guilty to a § 1956(h) conspiracy whose indictment incorporated wire transfers totaling about $25,000. The Board relied on those counts. That was error, Fuentes held at 1182. Those transfers were overt acts, meaning steps allegedly taken to advance the conspiracy, and a § 1956(h) conviction does not require proof of one. Overt acts in such an indictment are “not admitted by a plea,” so relying on them “was not fundamentally fair.” Fuentes still lost. Her presentence report said the plea agreement stipulated to “more than $70,000,” she offered nothing to contradict it, and the court held a presentence report may be used. The petition was denied.

The evidence can come from outside the criminal file. In Orellana v. Mayorkas, No. 20-16092, 6 F.4th 1034, 1041 (9th Cir. July 28, 2021), a naturalization case about the fraud threshold, the court said courts making this finding “are generally free to consider any admissible evidence relevant to making such a determination.” The Board in Dominguez Reyes quoted the first part of that sentence through F-R-A-. The Fifth Circuit, by contrast, described the inquiry as made by reference to the record of conviction. Bogle v. Garland, No. 19-72290, 21 F.4th 637, 646–49 (9th Cir. Dec. 29, 2021), shows how far the Ninth Circuit’s version reaches. There, the court deferred to the Board under Chevron, a deference framework the Supreme Court has since overruled, and applied the approach to a marijuana-quantity limit. Over a dissent on the application, it relied on a police report along with other evidence and said no earlier court need have found the fact.

A conspiracy may be measured as a whole. Arman Khalulyan distracted gas station attendants while others installed card skimmers, and he said he earned a couple thousand dollars in all. He had stipulated in his plea to a loss of more than $250,000, but he argued that no one had determined the loss he personally caused. Khalulyan held at 1212 that under the fraud provision the loss tied to a conspiracy conviction “is the loss associated with the conspiratorial scheme that forms the basis for the conspiracy conviction,” and that the government “need not ascribe to the alien co-conspirator some individual portion of the overall conspiracy-related loss.” Khalulyan lost: The court dismissed his petition in part and denied the rest.

Khalulyan decided only the fraud provision. Applying it to laundering is our reading. But its reason, the basic law of conspiracy, applies to any conspiracy conviction, and it undercuts the objection Dominguez Reyes raised about his codefendants. The Board rejected that objection on the wording of one order. In the Ninth Circuit, a respondent who wins the wording point may still face Khalulyan. The counterargument starts with text: Chowdhury rests on the difference between funds and loss, and Fuentes describes the question as the funds laundered “by the petitioner.” Forfeiture adds a wrinkle. F-R-A- says that in conspiracy cases “only the proceeds personally acquired by an individual conspirator may be subject to forfeiture.” That case involved forfeiture of proceeds under 18 U.S.C. § 981(a)(1)(C). Dominguez Reyes does not say which statute supported its order, and section 982(a)(1) uses the broader “involved in” measure.

The facts that carried this case

Everything that made this record easy can be absent from the next one. The order named one person. It used the word “laundered.” It referred to the count of conviction. The amount was enormous. And, according to the Fifth Circuit, he “offered no evidence to dispute its findings.”

Margin matters. Nijhawan found the evidence clear and convincing “[i]n the absence of any conflicting evidence,” and said that “uncertainties caused by the passage of time are likely to count in the alien’s favor.” Babaisakov adds in a footnote that “the degree by which a loss is found to exceed $10,000 may also bear on” whether an order can carry the burden. To take an example of our own, an order for $12,000 entered on a preponderance standard, against a defendant who disputed it, is a different problem from one for $3.9 million that no one challenged.

The count of conviction matters too. The laundering conviction charged against Chowdhury rested on one check. Fuentes, Khalulyan and Dominguez Reyes pleaded to conspiracies. And plea language can matter, with a caution. In Chang v. INS, No. 01-35626, 307 F.3d 1185, 1190–92 (9th Cir. Oct. 11, 2002), a plea agreement said the offense of conviction “involves a loss to the victim of $605.30,” and the court would not let a larger restitution figure or a presentence report override it. It reversed and directed that Chang’s habeas petition, a federal court challenge to custody, be granted. Chang applied the modified categorical framework that Nijhawan later replaced for these thresholds. It is an argument for a plea with an agreed number, and it should not be treated as a settled rule.

If a forfeiture or restitution order is in your file

• Before a plea, treat the amount as an immigration term. Nijhawan gives a defendant “at least one and possibly two opportunities” to contest the figure, at sentencing and at the removal hearing. A sentencing objection left unmade became part of the reasoning against Dominguez Reyes. Criminal counsel and immigration counsel should review the plea’s stated amount, the forfeiture language and the presentence report together.
• Read what the order actually measures. Note whether it says funds laundered, proceeds obtained or victim loss. Under Chowdhury, those can be very different numbers.
• Match the order to the count. Compare it with the plea and judgment. A figure drawn from dismissed counts or from overt acts you never admitted raises the Fuentes problem. Check whether the order names you alone or several defendants.
• Bring contrary evidence to the immigration judge. In Nijhawan, Fuentes and Dominguez Reyes, the absence of conflicting evidence helped the government. Accounts, transaction records or sentencing transcripts that show a different amount should be offered, and any objection to the government’s records should be made then.
• Calendar the court deadline. The Ninth Circuit can decide whether a conviction is an aggravated felony even though 8 U.S.C. § 1252(a)(2)(C) otherwise limits review of such removal orders. A petition for review must be filed within 30 days of the final order under § 1252(b)(1).