Federal immigration officials and the Dodge County sheriff are denying they held a woman, who is a U.S. citizen, for more than 30 hours at O’Hare airport before releasing her onto the street in rural Wisconsin in the middle of the night, despite her family providing evidence of her apparent location inside those detention centers.
Family and friends of Summer Sundas “Sunny” Naqvi, 28, who was born in Evanston, Illinois, provided a detailed account of what they say was Naqvi’s extended and illegal detention at O’Hare, at the Broadview immigration facility in Illinois and then at the Dodge County Jail between March 5 and March 7. There was no reason for her to be detained, they said.
Naqvi had just returned from an international work trip when she and five colleagues were detained at the airport, family friend Kevin Morrison, a Cook County commissioner, said at a news conference March 8. Two of the colleagues are U.S. citizens and three are legal permanent residents, Morrison said.
The Department of Homeland Security and Dodge County Sheriff Dale Schmidt said in public statements March 9 that Naqvi’s claims are false. Naqvi’s sister, Sarah Afzal, said at the news conference that jail officials also repeatedly denied to her that Naqvi was in custody, even as her phone location pinged from inside the buildings.
“We saw her location on, smack dab in the middle of the [Broadview] facility. We saw her location in Wisconsin, in the middle of the facility. The cops were lying to our faces,” Afzal said. “They kept being like, ‘I don’t know what to tell you.'”
Morrison provided screenshots of Naqvi’s phone’s apparent location throughout her detention to the Journal Sentinel.
Afzal said she had driven to the Dodge County Jail, the last place her sister’s phone pinged before it lost power. Afzal said she was inside the building when she got a call from a stranger who said she found Naqvi at a nearby gas station.
Naqvi was released from Dodge at 5 a.m. March 7 and set off walking with a dead phone, Afzal said. The woman drove Naqvi to a Holiday Inn hotel in Beaver Dam, where Afzal met her.
Schmidt, the Dodge County sheriff, said in a statement March 9 that his office has no record of Naqvi ever being “booked, detained, or released from the Dodge County Jail,” and that no female inmates or detainees were “admitted or released during the timeframe in which these events were alleged to have occurred.”
The Dodge County Jail serves as the main U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention center in Wisconsin.
Naqvi’s attorney, Robert Held, said he spoke multiple times to officials with ICE at Broadview and at Dodge, and they would not acknowledge she had been in custody at either place. The answers he got before the story went public echo the current talking points from those officials.
“Dodge County said that there was no women there, that Sunny was not there, and Sunny has not been there,” Held said.
The Department of Homeland Security, for its part, called Naqvi’s account of events “blatantly false” in a statement.
The department said she arrived at O’Hare at 10:21 a.m. March 5, and Customs and Border Patrol officers referred her for additional inspection “based on law enforcement checks and conducted a baggage exam.” The department said “she departed CBP within 90 minutes” of arriving in the U.S., and she was not taken into custody or transferred to ICE for detention.
“CBP did NOT transfer any individuals to Broadview or perform any phone detentions from her flight on Thursday, March 5th,” the agency said.
That timing diverges from what Naqvi’s friends and family say happened. They said she was held from the morning of March 5 through at least midafternoon March 6 at the security checkpoint in O’Hare’s Terminal 3. She had been communicating with friends and family through her phone at the airport, but they lost contact with her just before 4 p.m.
That night, her phone turned back on and she sent a text to friend saying, “I think I’m at an ICE detention center.” Her phone pinged from the Broadview ICE facility. In the early-morning hours of March 7, it pinged from Dodge.
Naqvi was only told there were questions about her travel history, her attorney said. Naqvi was traveling to India with five colleagues, all of Pakistani descent. At their layover in Turkey, the coworkers with Pakistani passports weren’t allowed to continue to India, Morrison said.
With the trip canceled at the last moment, she and her coworkers were allowed to use the time for vacation, Morrison said. Naqvi traveled to Bulgaria and Austria. The group reunited for their return flight from Turkey to the U.S.
As of March 10, immigration officials still hadn’t returned her U.S. passport, Morrison said. The family was considering whether to file a lawsuit over her detention.
Morrison, who is also running for Congress in Illinois, said he is calling for the federal government to answer “why a U.S. citizen was ever placed in an immigration facility and moved across state lines.”
“The fact that this could happen to any U.S. citizen should terrify us all,” he said.
Sophie Carson is a general assignment reporter who reports on religion and faith, immigrants and refugees and more. Contact her at scarson@gannett.com or 920-323-5758.
This article originally appeared on Milwaukee Journal Sentinel: Dodge County sheriff, DHS deny detaining US citizen despite family account
Reporting by Sophie Carson, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel / Milwaukee Journal Sentinel
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