Gov. Maura Healey claims border czar Tom Homan has a “fixation” with the Bay State.

She’s right, he does. In the same way that Boston leaders have a fixation with Mass and Cass, launching repeated crackdowns on encampments, drug use and drug sales. They too have “brought hell” to the traffickers exploiting addicts by peddling lethal drugs.

Homan promised to “bring hell” to Boston, and he was here last week as U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement arrested 370 people who were allegedly living in the United States illegally.

Among those arrested were alleged drug traffickers, the same sort of people who get caught in Mass and Cass sweeps, or more likely the people who hire them. Drug traffickers are frequent recipients of “hell” unleashed by law enforcement, and that’s a good thing.

Back in 2015 when Healey was Attorney General, she said “Fentanyl is a highly potent and deadly opioid, and its use is growing exponentially in our state.” The problem still persists, and former President Biden’s porous borders helped traffickers ply their trade here.

Healey insists that “we’re a very safe state,” but we’re a state that allowed undocumented immigrants to get driver’s licenses. We’re a state that didn’t thoroughly vet the immigrants in the state emergency shelter system, not until a Dominican man in the U.S. illegally was arrested at Revere shelter with an AR-15 and an alleged fentanyl stash worth $1 million earlier this year. Now we do background checks.

And while we’re not a “sanctuary state” as a whole, we have sanctuary cities which prohibit their police from cooperating with ICE on civil immigration detainers.

They wear their “sanctuary city” status proudly, despite the ceaseless parade of headlines chronicling arrests of illegal immigrants charged with child rape, murder and drug trafficking.

Imagine if federal and local law enforcement weren’t “fixated” on these problems? If the alleged drug traffickers caught in the recent federal sweep managed to evade ICE and remain at large?

“ICE and our federal law enforcement partners are committed to protecting the homeland through the eradication of transnational criminal organizations, dismantling dangerous criminal gangs preying on the American public, locating and arresting criminal alien offenders, and making our communities a safer place to live,” ICE Enforcement and Removal Operations Boston Acting Director Patricia Hyde said in a statement after last week’s raid.

The gangs included MS-13, Tren de Aragua, and Trinitarios.

You want someone fixated on getting these bad actors out of business, and out of the state.

Massachusetts policies have done more to make the state part of the problem than part of the solution. It’s the yeoman’s work of Boston’s ERO office and ICE that has kept the floodwaters at bay.

So if Tom Homan’s “fixation” on Massachusetts means more fentanyl and meth pushers and dangerous gang members are taken out of local communities, we say “bring it on.”

And thank you.

Editorial cartoon by Joe Heller (Joe Heller)