Academy Award-winning actor Angelina Jolie paid a visit to Utah Sen. Mitt Romney on Tuesday to talk about children and families.
Jolie serves as a special envoy for the United Nations Commissioner for Refugees. She has gone on more than a dozen missions to refugee camps and war zones in many countries including Sierra Leone, Tanzania, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Syria and Sudan.
“I found myself a student at their feet,” Jolie told Vogue last year. “I have learned more from (refugees) about family, resilience, dignity and survival than I can express.”
Romney has proposed several bills that he says would strengthen low-income families.
“Met with Angelina Jolie to discuss ways in which we can support children and families at home and abroad. I’m grateful for her work as a Goodwill Ambassador and for her continued advocacy for the vulnerable,” Romney tweeted.
The senator’s office said it had no further information about the meeting beyond the tweet.
In addition to Romney, Jolie met with other lawmakers, including Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., Sen. Jeanne Shaheen, D-N.H., and Sen. Rob Portman, R-Ohio, to discuss the plight of Afghan women and religious minorities, the Violence Against Women Act, and how government can do a better job to help people who flee persecution find refuge through a robust asylum process in the U.S. and around the world.
Jolie has six children with her former husband Brad Pitt, three of whom were adopted internationally. She represented the U.N. Commissioner for Refugees as a goodwill ambassador from 2001 to 2012 before being named a special envoy.
In her expanded role, Jolie focuses on major crises that result in mass population displacements, undertaking advocacy and representing the U.N. refugee agency at the diplomatic level. She also engages with decision-makers on global displacement issues, according to the agency’s website.
Jolie spent World Refugee Day in Burkina Faso last June. More than 1.2 million people have been forced to flee their homes in the Sahel region of West and Central Africa since 2019.
“We have to wake up to the track we are on globally with so many conflicts raging and the very real possibility that climate change will force tens if not hundreds of millions of people to have to leave their homes in the future, with no possibility of return,” she said from a refugee camp.
“The way the international community tries to address conflict and insecurity is broken. It is erratic, it is unequal, it is built on inherited privilege, it is subject to the whim of political leaders, and it is geared towards the interests of powerful countries.”
Romney has proposed providing monthly federal payments to families for children to encourage marriage and raise the birth rate in the United States, both of which he says are not going in the right direction.
His plan would give a child allowance of $250 a month for school-aged children and $350 a month for those who are younger starting four months before a baby’s due date. The benefit would limit each family to $1,250 a month ($15,000 per year), and would phase out for higher-income families.
