For this April 2025 Member Spotlight - and in celebration of Earth Day - we talked to the CEO of the Ironbound Community Corporation (ICC), Hazel Applewhite, as well as ICC's Environmental Justice Policy Analyst Chloe Desir and Frontline Communications Manager JV Valladolid. We spoke about the intersection between environmental and immigrant justice, and ICC's work with immigrant communities more broadly.

What is the Ironbound Community Center?

Hazel Applewhite, CEO: We are a 56 year old agency that's located in the Ironbound section of Newark. We provide services around domestic violence, early childhood care, after school job placement, job training, family services, environmental justice, and community development.

In a nutshell, we believe that empowering families is important. And that also means ensuring that our families have a safe space to live in.

How does the work that the ICC does promote immigrant justice and empower immigrant communities?

Hazel: First and foremost, our staffing is multilingual. And that's important. Empowering families means that when they walk through the door, they actually see folks that look like them and sound like them.

I'm an immigrant myself, so I know what it’s like to enter into the US for the first time. At ICC, we educate folks on their rights and how to access services available to them. That can mean getting your child into school, figuring out how to get your documents translated, where to get food, how to get a job. All of those are things that we assist families with, because sometimes, the bureaucracy in the system can weigh on folks. It’s also important to make them feel safe, because there’s a lot of anxiety around this transition. Safety can mean having support groups, or just a place to enter that feels like home. That's the kind of work that we do in our direct services. 

Why is environmental justice important to the Ironbound?

Chloe Desir, Environmental Justice Policy Analyst: Before I came into this work myself, I thought that environmental justice was, like, saving whales and turtles and trees, and that's absolutely the case, but in the city of Newark, we're really advocating for Black and Brown people to have the right to clean air. We have a very polluted environment here in the Ironbound  with 3 fossil fuel power plants, the proposal of a 4th, and the state's largest garbage incinerator along with other industrial facilities nearby, an airport, and one of the largest seaports in the Eastern Seaboard. All of these things contribute to the environment. 

JV Valladolid, Frontline Communications Manager: All of these issues are examples of how Newark is always sacrificed for the greater good in New Jersey. When people throw out their garbage, when they turn on the light, or charge their phone, even when they flush their toilets, the community that's impacted by it is Newark. And the people who are having to breathe it in and deal with the health impacts are the same kinds of communities that are always dealing with this sort of issue: Black, Brown, and immigrant folks, as well as incarcerated people. We have this threat of Delaney Hall’s reopening, and we also have the burden of health impacts that come from that. 

As you mentioned, Delaney Hall is right around the corner. Why does ICC stand against the reopening?

Hazel: Number one: detention centers do not help families. They separate families. We’re talking about folks that have already gone through a lot of trauma just to get here, and mass detention and deportation just extends this generational trauma. We can do better. We should not be a country that separates families.

Number two is the fact that Delaney Hall is in a chemical corridor – it’s a very toxic space, with a lot of air pollution. We’ve heard many, many stories about the living conditions of folks who are  in detention. It's a human rights issue.

Chloe: When we start building these facilities, do we think at all about the people that will be incarcerated there? New Jersey's $400 million Essex County Correctional facility is right next to Delaney Hall – it’s this pipeline that comes with the environmental racism of putting people in conditions that they don't deserve to be in.

 JV: Exactly. Folks that have been detained at Delaney Hall have had to deal with the pollution just like our neighbors do every day, but they're not considered part of the community when these facilities are proposing to come here. It’s just another form of the inhumane treatment that people get when they're incarcerated.

What do you want the immigrant community here in the Ironbound and beyond to hear right now?

Chloe: You have power, more power than you think. Being able to advocate for yourself – no matter what your status is – is a right. Being able to have the things that you deserve here is a right. Clean air is a right, accessible, affordable housing is a right, being able to be comfortable to exist here is a right. You deserve these things, regardless of status.

JV:  There are ways you can advocate: you can get involved, you can send a letter, show up to an action, talk to your family and friends about what's going on, whether it's the immigration detention center here or the fact that it’s among these toxic facilities that are poisoning everyone. 

If you care about immigrant justice, Black Lives Matter, queer justice, all forms of social justice, then what's going on here in Newark should be important to all of us.

Hazel: We have to stick together. We need to pull together and demand that all immigrants are treated with respect and dignity, because at the end of the day, this is not about documented and undocumented. It's about human rights.