SARATOGA SPRINGS, Utah County—Mia Love, who represented north Sanpete County in Congress from 2014-2018 and whose final message, “My living wish for the America I know” ran in last week’s Sanpete Messenger, died Sunday at her home in Saratoga Springs. She was 49.

The daughter of Haitian immigrants who settled in Norwalk, Conn., she converted to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and moved to Utah in 1998.

She married Jason Love, who she had met while he was serving a mission in New York. They settled in Saratoga Springs, where Love got involved in an effort to convince a developer to eradicate troublesome flies called midges from her subdivision.

At 28, she was elected to the city council and a few years became mayor. In 2012, she was asked to speak at the Republican National Convention. That year, she ran for Congress against Democratic incumbent Jim Matheson and lost.

Before the next congressional election in 2014, Matheson retired from Congress. In a race against Democrat Doug Owens, Love won the seat. Owens ran again in 2016, and Love defeated him a second time.

In the 2018 campaign, she faced Salt Lake County Mayor Ben McAdams. The election was so closed it ended up in court. But McAdams won by fewer than 700 votes.

Love made history by being the first black Republican woman elected to Congress. After Donald Trump used a profanity in reference to Haiti, and a Republican member of Congress appeared to support Trump’s view, Love took a stand in a Republican caucus.

In her autobiography she wrote, “I asked leadership, ‘Are you OK with this?’ …He clearly sees the people of Haiti as inferior. Do you see me as inferior?….If we don’t see everyone as equal under God, we have bigger problems.” Love said she got a standing ovation from the caucus.

In visits to Sanpete County as a congresswoman, Love talked about the need for Congress to step up to its constitutional role. She called for limiting the executive to the powers enumerated in Article 2, the section of the constitution dealing with the presidency. Congress, she said, needed to fully exercise its powers as outlined in Article 1, including the power of the purse.

She was diagnosed with a serious form of brain cancer in 2022. On March 1 of this year, her family announced her cancer was no longer responding to treatment and she was focusing on enjoying what time she had left. She died 15 days later.