“I don’t know what happened,” James said of the initial summons. She kept one pink earbud in as we talked outside the church. She had just successfully cleared her warrant. In March, she recounted, she was sitting on a bench with her cousin in Fulton Park when a police officer approached. “She gave us both tickets for public drinking, but I wasn’t even holding anything”. She stretched the length of the earbud wire across her stomach. She thought her pregnancy must have been visible to the officer that night. James was unable to travel to the summons court, in lower Manhattan, the day she had been assigned to answer the citation. As generally happens with unanswered summonses, a warrant was put out for her arrest.

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