The Dodge County Sheriff’s Office is investigating the case of a 28-year-old Illinois woman who said immigration authorities detained her for an extended time at O’Hare airport and later took her to the Dodge County Jail.
The investigation occurs as more information comes to light about Summer Sundas “Sunny” Naqvi’s personal history. Reporting indicates she claimed to work at a company that never employed her, and she was embroiled in a complicated criminal case involving a false police report while in college.
Officials from several agencies have repeatedly denied the story of Naqvi is accurate, including Dodge County Sheriff Dale Schmidt. His department is actively investigating the case to “determine the facts,” he said March 12.
Schmidt said his department had no record of Naqvi, of Skokie, Illinois, ever being at the jail or booked into it. He didn’t know if she could have been near or outside the jail complex around the night of March 6 into March 7, he said in an email. In addition to local inmates, Dodge also holds federal detainees for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Naqvi is a U.S. citizen born in Evanston, Illinois.
Schmidt said he would not release any jail surveillance footage or booking logs for the night Naqvi’s family and friends say she was detained at Dodge, “until we determine what actually happened.”
The sheriff’s office also denied a Milwaukee Journal Sentinel open records request for the materials, saying they were “part of an ongoing federal and internal investigation.”
Naqvi’s family declined to comment for this story, saying they were concerned about retaliation from the Department of Homeland Security.
Naqvi’s attorney, Robert Held, didn’t respond to follow-up requests for comment March 11 from the Journal Sentinel. But he defended Naqvi’s version of events to the Chicago Tribune.
Family account differs from Homeland Security statements
Naqvi’s family said between March 5 and March 7, upon returning from an international flight, she spent 30 hours at O’Hare and another roughly 13 hours detained between the Broadview immigration detention center in Illinois and the Dodge County Jail in Wisconsin.
Naqvi’s sister, Sarah Afzal, and a family friend, Cook County Commissioner Kevin Morrison, had been relating Naqvi’s story to the public since they say she was released from Dodge, using screenshots that appear to show her phone’s location in those places. Naqvi herself has not spoken on camera, although the Chicago Tribune did reach her by phone. Morrison is in a primary fight for a Congressional seat, with an election days away.
Meanwhile, the Department of Homeland Security said Naqvi entered the Customs and Border Protection area at O’Hare at 10:21 a.m. March 5, was sent into a secondary inspection area, and spent less than 90 minutes as she was inspected by CBP overall.
DHS published two still images late March 11 that it said were screengrabs from surveillance video showing Naqvi entering and exiting the secondary inspection area at O’Hare with her baggage. The time stamps on the photos appear to show a woman carrying a red suitcase into a room at 10:46 a.m. on March 5, then leaving through doors marked with exit signs at 11:42 a.m. pushing a luggage cart.
Online commenters pointed out obvious blurring on both images published by DHS. The blurring appears to be covering a line of text on the surveillance footage near the top of the images, just under the time stamp. One of the exit signs appears in double, potentially because a digital blurring tool would pull in pixels from nearby parts of the photo.
Morrison, Afzal and Held have said that as they searched for Naqvi, officials repeatedly denied she was being detained. Naqvi’s supporters pointed to her phone location data that appeared to show she was inside those buildings.
DHS under the second Trump administration has drawn fire for its brash public statements and at-times antagonistic online postings.
In several instances, DHS statements about immigration arrests were later debunked by video footage and eyewitness accounts. The most notable case was former DHS Secretary Kristi Noem calling Alex Pretti a “domestic terrorist” after he was fatally shot by agents.
Questions remain about whether others were detained
Naqvi was traveling for work with five colleagues, all of Pakistani descent, and all five were detained along with her, Morrison said. Naqvi’s LinkedIn page, which was later taken down, showed she was employed at SAP, the German software company.
But a spokeswoman for SAP said in a statement: “Sunny (Sundas) Naqvi is not and was never an SAP employee. None of the ICE detainees from the flight were SAP employees.”
It’s also unclear whether the other five people were actually detained by ICE. Their identities remain unknown. The Department of Homeland Security said it did not “transfer any individuals to Broadview” from Naqvi’s flight.
Naqvi pleaded guilty to filing a false police report in 2019, served two years of probation and the case was dismissed as part of an agreement, according to the Chicago Tribune. In college, after Naqvi made a sexual harassment claim against a University of Illinois professor, two ex-boyfriends say she involved them in a series of “convoluted plots” that resulted in criminal charges, trials and one acquittal for Naqvi. In one case, Naqvi apparently tried to pin the ransacking of an apartment on an ex-boyfriend.
Naqvi was expelled from the University of Illinois for her role in the incidents, according to the News-Gazette in Champaign-Urbana.
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 story was updated because an earlier version included an inaccuracy.
This article originally appeared on Milwaukee Journal Sentinel: Sheriff investigating as woman’s immigration detention story faces questions
Reporting by Sophie Carson, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel / Milwaukee Journal Sentinel
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