Mia Love, the first Black Republican woman elected to Congress, who served from 2015 to 2019, when her opposition to the candidacy and presidency of Donald J. Trump earned his enmity, died on Sunday at her home in Saratoga Springs, Utah. She was 49.
Her family announced the death in a post on one of Ms. Love’s social media pages. She had been diagnosed in 2022 with a glioblastoma, an aggressive type of brain tumor.
A Brooklyn-born daughter of Haitian immigrants, Ms. Love defied every kind of political stereotype: She was a convert to Mormonism, a Black woman elected in a state that is 80 percent white, and a Republican who bucked her party’s most dominant leader, Mr. Trump.
First elected to the House in 2014, where she was the sole Republican member of the Congressional Black Caucus, Ms. Love said she would not vote for Mr. Trump for president in 2016 after the release of audiotape in which he boasted of groping women. In Congress, she supported Mr. Trump’s tax cuts package but repudiated his crackdown on immigration, including separating families at the border, which she called “absolutely terrible.”
She lost re-election in 2018 as part of a national backlash to Mr. Trump’s presidency, in which Democrats picked up 40 seats in the House and the majority.
The president mocked her in a news conference the day after Election Day, blaming her defeat, which was not yet official, on her failure to embrace him. “Mia Love gave me no love, and she lost,” Mr. Trump said. “Too bad. Sorry about that, Mia.”
Two weeks later she conceded the race to Ben McAdams, a Democratic mayor, who edged her out by just 694 votes.
In a scathing concession speech, Ms. Love said Mr. Trump had “no real relationships” with people, “just convenient transactions.”
“What did he have to gain by saying such a thing about a fellow Republican?” she added.
In her first appearance on the national stage, Ms. Love showed herself to be a mold-breaker: She thrilled the Republican National Convention in 2012 by challenging the first Black president, Barack Obama, who was seeking a second term. “Mr. President,” she said, “I am here to tell you we are not buying what you are selling in 2012!”
Though she lost her race for Congress that year, in Utah’s Fourth District, which includes part of Salt Lake City and its southern suburbs, she went on to win in 2014 and was re-elected in 2016.
While in Washington, the House passed a bill she had introduced to prevent members from settling sexual harassment claims with taxpayer money. In 2018, Ms. Love was one of a handful of Republicans who sought to protect undocumented immigrants brought to the country as children — so-called Dreamers — after Mr. Trump canceled an Obama-era order safeguarding them from deportation.
“I’m a daughter of parents who immigrated here,” Ms. Love said at the time. “My parents actually had to leave my brother and sister in Haiti for five years. Until their families have to sacrifice like that, they can’t really tell me where to be on this issue.”
She was born Ludmya Bourdeau on Dec. 7, 1975, in Brooklyn. Her father, Jean Maxime Bourdeau, left Haiti in 1974, fleeing political repression; his wife, Maria, joined him a few months later.
After Mia’s birth, the couple brought their two older children in Haiti to the U.S. They moved to Norwalk, Conn., which had a vibrant Haitian community and where Mr. Bourdeau found work as a janitor and in a factory. The parents emphasized the importance of education. Mia graduated from Norwalk High School and earned a bachelor’s degree in performing arts from the University or Hartford Hartt School in 1998. She aspired to a career on Broadway.
Raised as a Roman Catholic, she was converted to Mormonism by missionaries for the Church of Latter Day Saints in Connecticut. She moved to Utah in 1998 while working as a flight attendant and married Jason Love, who was active in local Republican politics. The couple had three children.
Ms. Love became civically active herself in their community, Saratoga Springs, a suburb of Salt Lake City. Her first cause was modest: persuading a developer to eradicate an infestation of midges, a small bug, that was plaguing homeowners.
From there, she ran successfully for the Saratoga Springs City Council in 2003 and six years later was elected mayor of Saratoga Springs, the first Black female mayor in the state.
After leaving Congress, Ms. Love was a political commentator for CNN and in 2021 joined a rotating cast of conservatives on ABC’s “The View,” the daytime talk show. She published a memoir, “Qualified,” in 2023.
This month, with her brain cancer no longer responding to treatment, Ms. Love wrote an opinion article in the Salt Lake City-based newspaper The Deseret News about “the American I know,” a paean to the country’s values through a traditional Republican lens of small government, personal responsibility and a welcoming attitude toward immigrants.
She wrote, “Some have forgotten the math of America — whenever you divide you diminish.”
