Apparently so.

Ahhhhh, March! The weather's getting warmer, the bumblebees are bzzzzzzzing out of their bumblebee holes (that's where they live), and in Texas, law enforcement officers and judges are coming together (literally) in one big mesquite BBQ-flavored jizzfest over the Great Texas Warrant Roundup. It's like a fun spring festival, but for sadists.

Aren't you excited to learn what "Great Texas Warrant Roundup" means? No? Smart people, you are:

[W]hat it is, in practice, is a shakedown of Texas’s working poor.

The Great Texas Warrant Roundup is an annual statewide collaboration of courts and law enforcement agencies. Their goal is to collect payment of overdue fines and fees from Texans who have outstanding warrants for unpaid traffic tickets and to arrest and jail those who can’t pay.

That sounds nice! But that's the liberal socialism-loving ACLU, so it's probably doing liberal media lies to us RIGHT AS WE SPEAK.

Let's go right to the Great Warrant Do-Si-Do And Shootin' Contest's website, to see if it sounds any better:

[O]nce the roundup starts you can be arrested at any time or any place; including your home, at work or school. It's almost impossible to hide from the police since they are equipped with special license plate scanning devices in their cruisers to easily check plates and find out if you're on the warrant list. If you have outstanding warrant in Texas, it's strongly advised to contact the local authorities and straighten out the warrant before the grace period ends.

By the end of the Great Texas Roundup in March, thousands of civilians in Texas will have either been arrested or paid millions of dollars in fines.

We told you the state of Texas was making sex sploots on itself over this. Yee-haw! Gon' arrest a few thousand "delinquents" and then do some brawlin' at the hootenanny, pew pew pew!

Oh, but why did we just say "delinquents" with those scare quotes? Because for real, the majority of these "criminals" are people who got a ticket for doing the Bad Driving on the roadway, and most of the people who get caught up in the Great Texas Arrest-A-Thon, Flea Market and Bar & Grill are working poor people, just like the liberal ACLU said!

Here, have a little rundown of how much this fucks the poors:

Depending on the jurisdiction, a ticket for failing to signal a lane change ... will cost you around $66. But the state tacks on $103 in court costs and a host of fees, some bordering on Kafkaesque. Texas will charge you a public defender fee, even though courts refuse to appoint a public defender for traffic ticket cases. If your fine is already too expensive to afford, Texas charges a fee to put you on a payment plan. You’ll even pay an “administrative fee” for the privilege of handing money over to the court. For people who are too poor to pay their traffic fines, a $66 fine can balloon to over $500 because of these court costs and fees, as well as late fines and warrant fees when towns try to arrest the poor (at times illegally) to collect money they simply do not have.

If you can’t afford to keep up with these fees, the state will suspend renewal of your driver’s license (add another $30 for the License Renewal Suspension Fee), and you’ll be unable to register your car, making it illegal for you to drive to the job you need to take care of your kids and pay off your spiraling debt. An expired registration means you’re certain to be pulled over and put back at square one, with new tickets, new fines, new fees, and no hope.

WHAT EVEN THE HELL, TEXAS? Like, we know everything is bigger in Texas, including the overall dickishness toward poor people and minorities, but this is some OFF THE CHARTS fuck the poors stuff.

The ACLU tells the story of a lady named Valerie Gonzalez, who has five kids, and who got a couple tickets nine years ago. On top of all the thousands of dollars she suddenly owed and couldn't afford, she lost her job because the state put her in jail. Consider justice ... served? Fucked in the ass with a prickly pear cactus, which is the official fuck in the ass implement state plant of Texas?

And that is what Texas is doing for the month of March: shuddering in orgasmic glee over all the new Valerie Gonzalez-style victims it's going to make. And at the end of the month, having fucked as many poors as it possibly could, the state will heave a blissful sigh as it launches its Texas-sized splooge sock into the Gulf of Mexico, which will probably kill some dolphins, FUCK YOU TEXAS, THE END.

[ACLU / TexasWarrantRoundup.org]