Pastor Josh Gill from Central Presbyterian Church in Downingtown, left, stands with Carlos Della Valle, his son Alessandro and Carlos’ wife Angela.
Mention the name Carlos Della Valle around Pastor Josh Gill and he can’t help but get emotional. The journey Carlos has been on since August of 2025 and the steps that Josh and his congregation at Central Presbyterian Church in Downingtown, PA, have taken alongside Carlos have created a bond so strong that it’s only natural for feelings to pour out when the situation is revisited.
Carlos is an undocumented citizen living in the United States who has been actively seeking to adjust his immigration status. The 49-year-old Mexican national fled cartel violence in 1997, and during the next three decades he made a life in Downingtown for himself, his wife and son working as a plant manager for a local company. In December of 2024 while returning from a family vacation, Carlos was detained at an airport in the U.S. Virgin Islands. He was charged with illegal re-entry but released on bail.
Nine months later in St. Thomas, he was acquitted of the federal illegal re-entry charge. However, following the verdict, he was asked to report to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), which he did voluntarily. Carlos spent the next eight-plus months in detention centers, being held captive in more than a dozen different locations from Florida to Louisiana, overcoming deplorable living conditions with the hope of one day reuniting with his family in southeastern Pennsylvania.
On April 29, Carlos’ dream became reality. He was released from his holding unit in Winn, LA, ending a 258-day ordeal and returning to his Downingtown home. Waiting for him was a community that had prayed, gathered and fundraised on many occasions in hopes of seeing justice served. Josh and Central Church were among the first to welcome Carlos with open arms, as they walked with him every step of the way.
Josh first heard of Carlos’ situation through Tim Dooner, the pastor at Valley Forge Presbyterian Church. Carlos’ wife Angela is a teacher in a school district near Valley Forge, and Tim saw a GoFundMe post with details about Carlos’ situation, prompting him to reach out to Josh to let him know the details about one of his community members.
Josh knew he and his congregation needed to step up to help this family. He prepared a message that he hoped would lead his worshipers at Central Church down the right path.
“I preached a sermon in August of last year basically asking the congregation how they were going to love their neighbor,” he recalled. “We looked at Carlos – he’s literally our neighbor. What are we going to do to love him in this absolutely horrifying situation where he’s separated from his wife, he’s separated from his 20-year-old son, and what is the church going to do for this family?”
“I did not tell them what to do. I had a congregant say to me, ‘I’m upset right now because you didn’t tell us what we need to do.’ And I said to them, ‘Well, it’s up to you guys. I’m calling you to love your neighbor.’”
Minutes later, Josh walked into the church’s Fellowship Hall and saw a group of elders sitting around a table. They had written a motion for him as moderator to call a special session meeting to approve a prayer vigil for Carlos. It provided the first steps for Central Church in what would be a lengthy and treacherous nine-month journey alongside Carlos.
An interfaith prayer service was organized, with 300 people filling the church’s parking lot. It showed Josh and his congregation that the Downingtown community wanted to support their neighbor and solidified that Central Church needed to play a role in that.
“We called the community to prayer, to silence, to reflection,” Josh recalled. “We continued to try to build momentum.”
Signs show support for a movement to return Carlos Della Valle to his home in Downingtown, PA.
In the weeks after, the church and Angela’s friend Leigh designed, posted and handed out “Bring Carlos Home” signs and buttons to help raise awareness of the situation in the community. Josh spoke before 6,000 people at a No Kings Rally, emphasizing that Carlos was not receiving due process, proper medical care and other necessities while in confinement.
“What he (Carlos) will tell you is that these places are as awful as you can imagine,” Josh said. “He was in Alligator Alcatraz. He was shackled to his waist, his legs and his hands for 36 hours in a cage, sitting in the Florida swamps. A cage with 32 men. There’s no privacy. There’s a toilet in the middle of these cages.
“He was moved 12 times. At one point he was pulled out of his bed in the middle of the night. They flew him to Brownsville (in Texas). The border patrol tried to force him to walk three steps across the border. He simply refused because he was asserting his rights. Everybody else walked across the border. They didn’t know what to do with him at that point, and they ended up flying him back to Winn in Louisiana.”
As Josh and his congregation continued to support Carlos, Carlos’ wife, Angela, invited Josh to visit Carlos in Winn. That interaction in January, a trip that was supported by Central Church through donations and other means, was the first time Josh met Carlos in person. The visit left a lasting impression on the pastor.
“I would describe it as one of the strangest experiences of my life,” Josh said. “In Winn, it is a former county jail and now it’s mostly a detention center. They have a practice from when it was a jail. They call them picnic visits.”
Leaving early in the morning, Angela, friend Steve and Pastor Josh left to got to the grocery store and then the detention center.
“We bought a lot of food,” Josh said. “The grocery store then inspects the food to make sure there’s nothing that can’t be brought into a detention center. If you bought an onion, they would cut the onion there at the grocery store for you.”
Once inside the detention center, the three of them visited Carlos in a pavilion with covered picnic tables and a barbecue grill like one that can be found at a state park. There were at least six covered tables, and multiple families gathered that day.
“For the next four hours, we sat and grilled food and talked,” Josh said as he fought back his emotions. “Carlos is a regular guy. He is caring, insightful and a quiet leader. He told me about his family, growing up in Mexico. I just listened. One of the things that has been reinforced through this experience is that ministry is about doing the next ‘right’ thing. The right thing in that moment was just to listen, to be present and to try to embody the compassion of God.”
Once back home, Central Church, Carlos and Angela’s friends, and community members continued to rally around the Della Valle family. In February, it held a “Winter Warmer” fundraiser that brought in 500 people and generated $22,000 in four hours through an auction, the sale of raffle tickets and donations. The funds went to help cover fees for Carlos’ legal team.
“They had music, they had food,” Josh said. “It was a beautiful moment where I just absolutely saw God’s kingdom in action.
“I remember walking into Fellowship Hall at one point. It’s absolutely jam-packed full of people and you’re hearing multiple languages. You’re seeing these tables where people are just allowing other people to sit with them and chat with them. They’re eating together, they’re united in this care for Carlos and this care for a common humanity. It was just this beautiful breath-taking moment.”
Central Presbyterian Church organized and participated in several rallies that raised funds to help return Carlos Della Valle back to his southcentral Pennsylvania home.
As momentum to bring Carlos home strengthened, the church joined forces with American Families United, which helped the church build a “pressure campaign.” Along with a couple of other organizations, AFU set up an in-person meeting with Angela and one of our Pennsylvania senators. During that meeting, the senator expressed his concerns for Carlos and spoke to him over the phone. This interaction eventually led to the senator asking for Carlos’ release.”
Josh heard of Carlos’ release from the Downingtown mayor, who called Josh on an evening when Josh was moderating a session meeting.
“I told the session that he had been released,” Josh said. “They immediately sang the doxology with tears streaming down their faces.”
A celebration to welcome Carlos home was held at the church a few weeks later, and once again, a couple of hundred people turned out for the gathering.
“It was again just this beautiful picture of the kingdom of God,” Josh said. “It was just this incredible moment. I know this will go down as one of the highlights of my life.”
More than $100,000 has been raised through a GoFundMe site for Carlos. Aside from legal fees, funds also supported Angela, who took a leave of absence from her teaching position to stay close by to Carlos as he moved around the South from one detention center to another. Meanwhile, their son was attending the University of Pittsburgh and trying to navigate college life while having his parents in another part of the country facing an unknown future.
Rallies, vigils and other efforts don’t always provide results, but clearly the ones spearheaded by the community and Central Church influenced not only a positive outcome but also the community at large.
“It made a difference on a couple of levels,” Josh said. “It made a difference for him personally because you’re putting people in a detention center for what would be equivalent to a misdemeanor. We were able to get him out.
“His status has not changed. He has to do regular check-ins with ICE. There are home visits. He’s under supervision. What it did was it gave him the ability to fight his case from home.
“It also made a massive difference for this congregation. We built relationships that we would have never had across faith lines. We built connections with different communities. We went to a Unity Shabbat and had an entire pew of Presbyterians. Those are relationships that we did not have before. Suddenly, from the perspective of the congregation, they’re talking to people that they didn’t know, and we’re building a better understanding of our shared humanity.”
“It made a difference in our community. Our community absolutely rallied around this family. And we’re trying to continue this work. I absolutely believe this thing made a massive difference.”
One of the first rallies Central Presbyterian Church held to support Carlos Della Valle was a prayer vigil in the church’s parking lot.
The next step in this process is advocating for Carlos to receive a work permit so that he can earn an income. The company where he was a plant manager for 25 years has held his job for him, so he has employment waiting once he gets clearance to return. Carlos’ support team is also working to advocate for the Dignity Act – a bipartisan piece of legislation that allows undocumented immigrants who have lived in the United States for more than five years to pay a fine and stay in the United States without fear of deportation or detention. This is another avenue that Josh feels needs to be explored by those who are fighting for justice. This, too, will take support from community members and organizations like churches.
“What I see is the need for more congregations to get involved with this because it will change their behavior,” Josh said. “It will change the behavior of the government, and it will make our communities a more welcoming place. What we really want to do is invite other people into this work.”
It’s been an emotionally draining and exhaustive time for Josh and the congregation at Central Church as they have come together to love their neighbor. Carlos and his family were not attenders of Central Church prior to his confinement, and while that has now changed, that’s not the purpose behind the congregation rallying around him. It’s what’s written in the scriptures and what’s been preached from the pulpit, and when needed, these worshipers sprang into action to help a family in need.
“I see the hand of God all over this,” Josh said. “I see God’s presence deeply in the stories that I get to hold as a pastor. What this has enabled me to do is interact with people who are in deeply vulnerable moments, to hold their stories, to hear their stories, to see God’s presence in their lives. I’ve seen God’s presence in the way all sorts of areas of our community got activated to work together for the common good.
“I see God’s presence in the fact that I can’t tell you the number of people who have come and talked to me and said, ‘I never knew a church would care.’ I can’t tell you the number of people who have shown up in our pews who have written off church who’ve shown back up. They’ve shown back up simply because we are doing what I absolutely believe is God’s work in this world.”