No, you can be arrested for failure to appear in court when summoned regardless of the basis, even if the basis of the summons is not itself an arrestable offense.<p>Further, the summons wasn&#x27;t about student loan debt, per se, it was about an unpaid <i>default judgement</i>.<p>What led to the arrest wasn&#x27;t the student loan debt, it was a series of failures to follow court orders or even respond to lawsuits.<p>Constitutionally, you cannot be arrested for inability to pay a debt (including a student loan debt) in the US. There are a whole lot of real problem cases of systems set up in such a way that one could argue that people are, in fact, arrested for what amounts to inability to pay a debt, and that&#x27;s a real problem (John Oliver did a good piece on this a while back) -- but this isn&#x27;t one of them. This is someone arrested for just ignoring court orders and hoping they would magically go away. The fact that the orders ultimately stem from a student loan debt is rather beside the point.