BRANDVIEW, Ill. (WGN) — Sarah Afzal spoke on behalf of her 28-year-old sister, Sundas Naqvi, outside U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement in suburban Broadview on Sunday.
Elected officials, family members and Sonny’s attorney stood by her side and shared what they said happened after Sonny returned to Chicago.
Sonny, a U.S. citizen who was born in Evanston, was detained by U.S. Customs and Border Patrol at Chicago’s O’Hare International Airport on Thursday as he returned from Türkiye, Afzal said.
“She was detained without reason. She was only told she had a strange travel history,” Cook County Commissioner Kevin Morrison said.
Afzal said Sunny and five of her colleagues were held in custody on the lower level of O’Hare Airport’s Terminal 3 for nearly 30 hours. Two of them are also U.S. citizens and three are green card holders.
The team was originally on a work trip to India with a brief stop in Türkiye, but canceled the trip due to visa issues. They split up and traveled to different countries in the region, with Sonny going to Bulgaria and Austria. The group later reunited in Türkiye and flew back to Chicago Thursday morning.
Afzal said her sister and her colleague ended up being detained instead of going home.
“The fact that this could happen to any American citizen should scare us all,” Morrison said.
More than a day after O’Hare was detained, Sonny’s phone signals were traced to the ICE facility in Broadview, family members said. That led to protests outside the facility, where families, community activists and elected officials gathered to demand answers.
But family members say federal authorities insist Sunny was not there, despite the location of her cell phone.
A few hours later, around 2 a.m. Saturday, they said her phone came back on and was pinging from an ICE facility in Wisconsin. Her family again said federal authorities denied she was in custody.
“We knew she was there because it kept showing her location right in the middle of the facility, and they were like, ‘We don’t know what to tell you,'” Afzal said. “Then we got the call while we were standing there.”
It was Sonny on the other end of the phone. Afzal said that around 5 a.m., Sonny told her she had been released and walked from the ICE facility to a nearby gas station
From there, a stranger gave Sunny a lift and took her to a hotel, where her family was finally able to reunite with her, Afzal said.
“It’s really scary to trust a stranger in the middle of nowhere in Wisconsin, but we found her,” Afzal said.
Afzal said Sunny now wants to share what happened so others don’t have to go through the same experience.
“She doesn’t want this to be about her. This is about everyone who is illegally detained,” Afzal said.
WGN-TV has reached out to the Department of Homeland Security for comment but has not yet received a response.
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