Panin: Why a $200,000 Federal Bail Order Did Not Bind the Immigration Judge

A federal magistrate judge ordered him released on a $200,000 bond. Prosecutors had charged him with conspiracy and money laundering tied to an alleged prostitution ring. Then the Department of Homeland Security, or DHS, detained him, and an immigration judge refused to release him on bond.

Anyone in that position might assume a federal judge has already settled whether he is safe to release. Anton Panin argued exactly that. The Board of Immigration Appeals, which hears appeals from immigration judges, rejected the argument and set a rule for immigration judges nationwide. Release from federal criminal custody does not stop an immigration judge from denying release from immigration custody. The person detained must still prove to the immigration judge that he should go free.

The decision is Matter of Anton Panin, 28 I&N Dec. 771 (BIA Jan. 11, 2024), Interim Decision #4070. A three-member panel decided it, Appellate Immigration Judge Petty wrote the opinion, and no member wrote separately. The Board dismissed Panin’s appeal, which left the immigration judge’s denial of bond in place.

A bond in one court, detention in another

In June 2023, Panin, a citizen of Russia born in the Soviet Union, was charged with conspiracy to commit an offense against the United States, money laundering conspiracy and money laundering. The indictment, the formal written charge, alleged that he ran a prostitution ring, transported women from Russia and Eastern Europe to work in it and laundered tens of thousands of dollars of the proceeds. Those were accusations.

A magistrate judge, a federal judge who handles early stages of criminal cases such as bail, ordered him released from pretrial custody on a $200,000 bond. DHS then detained him. Panin asked an immigration judge for a custody redetermination, the formal name for a request to be released or to have bond set. The judge denied it because Panin did not meet “his burden to demonstrate that he is not a danger to the community or a flight risk.”

The appeal rested on one idea: The question had already been decided

Panin’s argument was collateral estoppel, also called issue preclusion. Under that doctrine, once a court has conclusively decided a question, the losing party generally cannot fight over the same question in a later case. The Board quoted the Supreme Court’s statement in United States v. Stauffer Chemical Co., 464 U.S. 165 (1984), that it “can apply to preclude relitigation of both issues of law and issues of fact if those issues were conclusively determined in a prior action.”

Panin said the federal court had already found, under the Bail Reform Act of 1984, the law governing release in federal criminal cases, that he was neither a danger nor a flight risk. The immigration judge, he argued, could not conclude otherwise.

He staked the appeal on that point. The Board observed that he “does not meaningfully develop any other arguments” about the immigration judge’s danger and flight findings, and it cited a decision treating undeveloped arguments as given up. It answers one legal question, which the Board decided on its own, without deference to the immigration judge.

The Board answered with two laws and two burdens

The Board said Panin’s argument “misapprehends the relationship” between the two detention statutes. It compared the two laws and their different burdens of proof.

The burden of proof decides who loses when the evidence leaves a judge unsure. Under the Bail Reform Act, the Board explained, the government had to prove danger by clear and convincing evidence, a demanding standard well above “more likely than not.” It cited United States v. Salerno, 481 U.S. 739 (1987). In immigration court, 8 U.S.C. § 1226(a) governs detention while a removal case is pending. There, under Matter of Guerra, 24 I&N Dec. 37, 40 (BIA 2006), the detained person must establish that he is not a danger, a threat to national security or a flight risk. So the same uncertain record favors the defendant in one room and the government in the other.

The two laws also “serve different purposes, govern separate adjudicatory proceedings, and provide independent statutory bases for detention,” the Board wrote, quoting United States v. Lett, No. 18-749, 944 F.3d 467 (2d Cir. 2019). A judge’s order lifting criminal detention does not touch the separate authority to detain for immigration purposes.

The holding is one sentence: “[W]e hold that a respondent’s release from Federal pretrial criminal custody does not preclude an Immigration Judge from denying a respondent’s request for release from immigration detention under section 236(a) of the INA, 8 U.S.C. § 1226(a).” A respondent is the person in removal proceedings, the INA is the Immigration and Nationality Act, and section 236(a) is its number for § 1226(a). The next sentence says what happens instead: “[A]s in any custody redetermination proceeding, an Immigration Judge must determine whether, based on the record, a respondent has demonstrated that he or she merits release on bond under the custody redetermination provisions of the INA.”

The burden point deserves one more step, and this part is our explanation rather than the Board’s. Collateral estoppel requires the same issue in both cases, and the Supreme Court has said “issues are not identical if the second action involves application of a different legal standard, even though the factual setting of both suits may be the same,” in B&B Hardware, Inc. v. Hargis Industries, Inc., 575 U.S. 138, 154 (2015), quoting a treatise. A release order shows the government did not justify criminal detention. It does not show that the defendant proved he is safe. The criminal question also differs: Detention is proper when “no condition or combination of conditions” will reasonably assure appearance and safety. A large bond may be the very condition that made release possible. An immigration judge starts by asking whether this person has shown he is not dangerous and will appear.

Where the rule came from and where it went

The Board borrowed its conclusion from criminal cases that asked a related question: Can Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE, hold someone a criminal judge has released? Several appeals courts said yes, on different facts and under different immigration provisions.

• United States v. Veloz-Alonso, No. 18-3973, 910 F.3d 266 (6th Cir. 2018), involved a man with a final deportation order who had pleaded guilty to illegal reentry and was released before sentencing. The court reversed an order forbidding ICE to detain or deport him.
• United States v. Soriano Nunez, No. 18-2341, 928 F.3d 240 (3d Cir. 2019), involved a woman charged with passport fraud and held under § 1226(a). The court refused to read her release order as requiring ICE to let her go.
• Lett involved a man arrested at an airport after officers allegedly found cocaine in his suitcase and detained as someone seeking admission under a different section, 8 U.S.C. § 1225(b)(2)(A). The court ordered his dismissed indictment reinstated.
• United States v. Baltazar-Sebastian, No. 20-60067, 990 F.3d 939 (5th Cir. 2021), is closest to Panin. A magistrate judge concluded she was not a flight risk or danger, ICE held her under § 1226(a), and the appeals court set aside an order blocking that detention. It counted six other circuits on the same side, adding the Eighth, the Tenth and the D.C. Circuit.

Those courts decided whether a release order stops ICE from detaining a person. Panin goes a step further and addresses what an immigration judge must do with the bail decision. The Board said its rule was “[c]onsistent with the unanimous view of the courts of appeals that have addressed the issue.” It said Baltazar-Sebastian “controls the outcome here,” and then added: “[W]e take this opportunity to establish a nationwide rule.”

In Matter of Choc-Tut, 29 I&N Dec. 48 (BIA Feb. 25, 2025), later designated as precedent, the Board explained how an immigration judge may weigh a criminal bail decision. There, an immigration judge released a man with repeated drunk-driving arrests after noting that a state court had set only $500 bail. The Board reversed and cited Panin. An immigration judge “may consider a State court’s decision as to dangerousness and the amount of bail that was set in criminal proceedings,” it wrote, but “does not owe a State court custody order deference.” That language concerns a state court. We read it as equally apt for a federal release order, because Panin requires the same independent determination. So the bail decision is evidence. It is not an answer.

The Board has faced pending criminal charges in custody appeals before and since. Juan Guerra was out on a $500,000 criminal bond when the Board upheld the denial of immigration bond in 2006, though the dispute there was whether an unproven charge could be counted at all. And in Matter of Salas Pena, 29 I&N Dec. 173 (BIA 2025), the Board cited Panin while reversing an immigration judge’s $5,000 bond for a man facing a pending cocaine-trafficking charge.

What Ninth Circuit law adds in California

When the Board wrote in January 2024, it said in a footnote that “the Ninth Circuit has not directly addressed the issue,” and it pointed to one sentence from United States v. Diaz-Hernandez, No. 19-50336, 943 F.3d 1196 (9th Cir. Nov. 19, 2019): Detention under the two laws involves “separate functions that serve separate purposes and are performed by different authorities.” Those words were themselves a quotation from the D.C. Circuit’s decision in United States v. Vasquez-Benitez, No. 18-3076, 919 F.3d 546 (D.C. Cir. 2019).

That sentence came from a different dispute. A defendant facing an illegal-reentry charge argued that his immigration detainer, a request from ICE to hold him on release, proved he could not flee because ICE would simply take him. The district court refused to consider the detainer and kept him in custody, and the Ninth Circuit affirmed. It held that a detainer “is not a factor in this analysis, whether as evidence for or against a finding that the defendant poses a risk of nonappearance.” A criminal judge “may not speculate as to what may or may not happen in the future to the defendant under a different statutory and regulatory regime.”

Together, the two rules can produce a result that looks contradictory. The criminal judge is told to ignore what ICE may do, and Diaz-Hernandez describes an earlier decision, United States v. Santos-Flores, 794 F.3d 1088 (9th Cir. 2015), as barring reliance on a detainer to deny bail. The immigration judge need not follow the criminal judge’s conclusion. A person can win in one court for reasons that do not carry over to the other. And in this circuit the government’s burden on flight risk under the Bail Reform Act is a preponderance of the evidence, meaning more likely than not. Panin spoke only of the higher burden on danger, but on either ground the burden sits with the government, the reverse of immigration court.

The Ninth Circuit has also seen a criminal release weighed and found insufficient. Javier Martinez was released on his own recognizance, meaning on his promise to return, in a 2013 federal drug case and kept a clean record while on release. He then pleaded guilty, and he had an earlier cocaine conviction. At a later court-ordered bond hearing with the burden on the government, the Board “explicitly noted the evidence of his release on his own recognizance” and still found him dangerous, relying on the seriousness of his convictions and his history of reoffending, and the Ninth Circuit held that the Board had applied the correct burden in Martinez v. Clark, No. 21-35023, 124 F.4th 775 (9th Cir. 2024). For the ordinary first hearing under § 1226(a), the burden stays on the detained person; Rodriguez Diaz v. Garland, No. 20-16245, 53 F.4th 1189 (9th Cir. 2022), upheld those procedures against a challenge under due process, the constitutional guarantee of fair procedures, though it did not rule out challenges based on how the procedures worked in a particular person’s case.

The criminal court still has remedies of its own

Panin ends the estoppel argument in immigration court. A criminal court has remedies of its own when ICE detention interferes with the prosecution. Soriano Nunez expressly left the scope of those remedies open, noting that its record “does not indicate that the purpose of ICE detention was to circumvent a district court’s [Bail Reform Act] release order” and taking “no position” on remedies if such evidence appeared.

A Central District of California judge used that power in United States v. Parias, No. CR 25-00904-FMO (C.D. Cal. Dec. 27, 2025). After a release order, ICE moved the defendant to its Adelanto facility, about two hours from his lawyers in downtown Los Angeles. The government conceded that the detention was adversely affecting his right to counsel, and the court found a Sixth Amendment violation and dismissed the indictment with prejudice, meaning it could not be refiled.

The court acknowledged Lett, Soriano Nunez, Baltazar-Sebastian and similar decisions. Those cases, it said, stand for the general proposition that the Bail Reform Act does not stop the government from using its separate immigration detention power, “but say nothing about a district court’s authority to craft appropriate remedies for constitutional violations occasioned by the administrative detention of a criminal defendant.” The court drew on Santos-Flores, as it quoted that decision: If the government “jeopardizes the district court’s ability to try him, then the district court may craft an appropriate remedy.”

Parias sits beside Panin without contradicting it. It is one trial court’s remedy in a criminal case, and the government filed a notice of appeal three days later, so check its status before relying on it. It shows that an access-to-counsel problem belongs in front of the criminal judge, while the bond request stays with the immigration judge.

The rule applies only where a bond hearing exists

Panin concerns section 236(a), the discretionary track. Two things can take a person off it.

A 2025 amendment, 8 U.S.C. § 1226(c)(1)(E), requires detention of certain people who are inadmissible, meaning barred from admission, for entering without inspection, fraud or lack of documents who are merely “charged with” or “arrested for” listed offenses, including burglary, theft, larceny, shoplifting and assault of a law enforcement officer, or a crime causing death or serious bodily injury. Panin’s conspiracy and laundering charges are not on that list. For someone whose charge is, a criminal release may lead straight to detention with no bond hearing.

And Matter of Yajure Hurtado, 29 I&N Dec. 216 (BIA 2025), says immigration judges lack authority to hear bond requests from people present in the United States without admission. Panin treats its respondent’s detention as falling under § 1226(a). Yajure Hurtado is being fought in federal court, so the first question in any new case is which detention statute applies.

If a criminal release order is your best fact

• Offer the order as evidence and do not argue that it binds. After Panin, “a federal judge already decided this” fails as a legal argument. Under Choc-Tut, a bail decision can still be considered. Tell the immigration judge what it shows.
• Get the transcript and the conditions. Find out what the criminal judge actually said about danger and flight, and which conditions the release depended on. A finding that conditions would do is different from a finding that the person is safe without them.
• Build the immigration record separately. The burden is on the detained person. Evidence that answers danger and flight has to go in at the bond hearing. The judge may rest on “any information that is available,” and Guerra allows any evidence “that is probative and specific.” Compliance while on criminal release helps, as Martinez’s record shows, but it did not decide his case.
• Develop every argument on appeal. The Board treated undeveloped arguments as waived. A custody appeal that rests on one legal theory leaves the factual findings standing if that theory fails.
• Coordinate the two lawyers. Testimony at a bond hearing may carry risks in the criminal case, and a transfer can cut off access to defense counsel. That is our practical caution. Raise access problems with the criminal judge quickly and document each failed attempt to reach the client, as the defense did in Parias.
• Watch for changed circumstances. A later bond request must be in writing and show that circumstances “have changed materially.” In our view, a dismissal or acquittal is an obvious candidate.

Later developments. On July 30, 2026, the Ninth Circuit held in Rodriguez Vazquez v. Bostock, No. 25-6842, 183 F.4th 1160 (9th Cir. 2026), that “aliens present without admission who are apprehended in the interior of the United States are subject to the detention regime of § 1226, not § 1225(b)(2)(A).” That reading differs from the one the Board adopted in Yajure Hurtado, and for people who fall under § 1226(a) on that reading, Panin is the relevant rule. The panel was divided, and the question is not settled. On October 1, 2026, the Supreme Court agreed to decide it in Rhoney v. Barbosa da Cunha, No. 26-104. The government reports in its petition for certiorari, a request that the Supreme Court hear the case, No. 26-568, filed October 28, 2026, that on October 6, 2026, the Ninth Circuit stayed its mandate, the order that puts its judgment into effect, until the Supreme Court rules. Confirm the current state of the law before filing.