A young woman from Skokie who had been travelling abroad during the start of the war in the Middle East, made it back from Turkey on Thursday.
And she was detained at O’Hare Airport along with friends by immigration authorities who denied they had them, according to her supporters.
Sundas “Sunny” Naqvi is an American citizen, born in Evanston.
She was detained on Thursday morning along with two other US citizens and three Green Card holders with Pakistani passports, according to her family.
She later left a voicemail for a friend.
“It’s the longest that I’ve ever been at O’Hare,” she said. “Apparently they can just keep you overnight if they need to, I mean, I know we’re at war right now, there’s going to be increased security stuff.”
On Friday afternoon, the woman’s phone was traced to the ICE facility in Broadview.
There was a protest involving her family, activists and some elected officials that went into the night.
One woman is heard in a video posted on social media, “Call the Attorney General’s office.” A man was yelling, “You got a US citizen right now in there, we’ve got her location on her phone.”
Her parents were there with her birth certificate.
Federal authorities denied she was inside, despite the phone’s presence.
Then it was turned off, says Cook County Commissioner Kevin Morrison, a family friend, who said, “we were lied to.”
“The latest that we heard was that they sent ICE agents to search around the facility to see if she was in distress wandering around the facility and somehow oddly ended up in Broadview after being detained at O’Hare for over 30 hours,” he said, “clearly not adding up.”
He said Naqvi’s phone was back on hours later, around 2 a.m. on Saturday.
She was in another ICE facility, in Juneau, Wisconsin.
She was eventually released about 40 hours after she was initially detained and was picked up by family members.
“This is ridiculous,” Morrison said. “Clearly this administration does not do a lot of forward thinking and does not deal well when they’re caught in sticky situations,” he told WBBM.
He said, “we caught them lying through their teeth.”
Naqvi is planning to tell her story publicly tomorrow at 2 p.m.
at the Broadview ICE facility.
WBBM has asked Immigration and Customs Enforcement for comment.