Letter to the Editor

June 25, 2025

To the editor,



Thank you for giving me this opportunity to respond to the June 16 letter to the editor objecting to a Norris City Council decision.

Norris’s mayor, with the unanimous agreement of the council members present, removed from the agenda an item that would have authorized the Norris police department to make arrests to enforce immigration laws.

The writer objected strongly, stating that the council had “…folded to the whims of the mob from Oak Ridge and the grotesque Anderson County Democrat(ic) party,” and asked, “…why is the Oak Ridge mob … packing a Norris City Council meeting and intimidating the Norris City Council?” I attended that June 9 meeting, and I recognized almost all the people there as Norris neighbors. I know some of them to be Democrats and some to be Republicans, but political party membership was completely irrelevant to our concerns and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) actions. Like most towns in East Tennessee, Norris doesn’t have an immigration problem. We just want to be a community where brown skin is not a risk factor for incarceration, where our excellent police force is not forced into racial profiling, where my friends and neighbors who don’t happen to have white skin and East Tennessee accents are just as safe walking around without their papers as I am.

The Norris City Council is a non-partisan body. They strive to make decisions that are best for Norris, regardless of national politics and culture wars. I don’t agree with their every decision, but that is to be expected in a democracy.



Carolyn Boswell

Norris

Letter to the Editor

June 25, 2025

To the editor,



On July 2,1776, the Second Continental Congress, the Founding Fathers of the United States of America, signed the Declaration of Independence, and it was officially adopted on July 4, 1776.

This meant that the United States would now be its own nation, and we would no longer be part of the British Empire. There were various reasons as to why the Founding Fathers wanted to break away from the British Empire.

Some of the reasons were because Britain continued to increase taxes on items that citizens bought everyday and because the people wanted to govern themselves. Depriving them of a trial by jury and imposing taxes on them without consent are just some of the many grievances that citizens had with the British government.

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