Folks, every once in a while somebody at a big-city newspaper writes something true, and I have to sit down and catch my breath. The Boston Herald ran an editorial this week with a headline I wish every paper in this country had the guts to print: "We're safer because of ICE."

Let me tell you, in a city like Boston, that's no small thing. That town has spent years calling itself a sanctuary city, which is a pretty way of saying it decided not to cooperate fully with the folks whose whole job is getting criminals out of our neighborhoods. And now here comes the Herald's editorial board, laying out the plain arithmetic: crimes committed by illegal aliens are a real concern, and the men and women of ICE are the ones doing something about it.

Imagine that. A newspaper saying out loud what regular people have been saying at their kitchen tables for years.

The editorial walks through what sanctuary policies actually mean on the ground. When a city refuses to hold a criminal alien for pickup, or refuses to tell ICE when he's being released, that person walks back out onto the same streets where your daughter catches the bus. The editorial makes the point I've been making since I started writing this column: the people who pay the price for sanctuary policies are never the politicians. They're the families, the shop owners, the kids walking home from school.

I taught fourth grade for 34 years in Dayton, Ohio. I can spot a dodge from across a cafeteria. And "sanctuary city" is the biggest dodge there is. It sounds warm and kind, like a church word. What it means in practice is that a city picks and chooses which federal laws it feels like honoring, and the fallout lands on people who never got a vote in the matter.

What I appreciated about the Herald piece is that it didn't hedge. Nobody in that newsroom wrote "critics say" or "some argue." The editorial board said illegal immigration brings crime into communities like Boston, and the enforcement officers working those cases deserve credit, not curses. After years of watching ICE agents get called every nasty name in the book by people who've never once had to knock on a door and tell a family something terrible happened, that kind of plain speaking is refreshing as a glass of sweet tea in July.

I've said it before and I'll say it till I'm blue in the face: these fine men and women at ICE don't get up in the morning hoping to break up anybody's family. They get up to remove people who broke our laws coming here and then broke more of them staying. When a city hands them roadblocks instead of cooperation, that city is being careless with other people's safety and then calling the carelessness a virtue. No amount of pretty words makes it compassionate.

The Herald deserves a tip of the hat for this one. Boston has plenty of voices willing to cry over every enforcement operation, and precious few willing to print the words "we're safer because of ICE." I hope readers clipped that editorial and put it on the refrigerator, right next to the grandkids' drawings, where the important stuff goes.

The truth has a way of sneaking past even the fanciest city gates. It got into Boston this week. I hope it keeps traveling south, and I'll keep writing every word of it down for you.

Talk soon, folks. Say the pledge.