Angelina Jolie has been isolating in LA with her children during the pandemic. She’s got all six kids home with her, although the younger kids are likely keeping up with their visits to Brad Pitt. This is the first time in a long time where Angelina is just HOME, with no far-flung refugee camp to visit or some movie to film. Which might explain why Angelina has been doing a lot of Time Magazine op-eds, Time Magazine videos, and just general awareness-raising around many issues involving the children of the pandemic. Angelina donated $1 million to No Kid Hungry, and now she’s writing letters to advocate for an increase in SNAP benefits:

Actress and humanitarian Angelina Jolie is lobbying Congress to increase food assistance to families across the U.S. as the coronavirus pandemic keeps millions in their homes and children out of schools, where many receive free meals. The Academy Award winner, who is well-known for her work internationally with refugees and conservation and human rights groups, wrote a letter to top congressional leaders, shared exclusively with USA TODAY, asking that Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) benefits be increased to help children who she says are going hungry because schools are closed and parents are out of work.

“Many of the most vulnerable children in America have missed nearly 740 million meals at school, due to closure resulting from the rapid spread of coronavirus. With parents facing lost jobs and wages, many of these children are going hungry,” she wrote in the April 20 letter to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer.

“While strengthening SNAP will not alleviate all of the challenges low-income families are facing during the public health emergency, it will help ensure that fewer children go to bed hungry in our country,” she said.

Congress has increased food assistance benefits by more than $15 billion amid the pandemic but Jolie and advocates argue more is needed, a proposal that Democrats have similarly demanded but failed to pass muster with Republicans in the last round of stimulus funding approved late last month. About half of all U.S. public schoolchildren rely on free or reduced-price meals. And while schools across the country have tried to continue providing grab-and-go lunches to those in need, some have halted such programs or limited them as workers have contracted COVID-19.

[From USA Today]

Yeah, Moscow Mitch won’t do sh-t about it. I doubt many Republicans will care, even though many of them come from districts or states which rely heavily on SNAP benefits. USA Today also says that before Angelina sent the letter, she did a video conference call with local food banks and No Kid Hungry, and they all discussed the very real cuts to food-assistance programs under the Trump administration, and many of those cuts were already in motion before millions of children lost their one meal a day at public school. During the call, Angelina apparently grew more and more upset with the realities of so many American children going hungry. She reportedly said, “I knew that there were problems in America. I knew that there was poverty. I could not believe when I realized how many schoolchildren in America were dependent on a meal to not go hungry. I was so disgusted that we have gotten to this point as a country.” Me too.

Photos courtesy of Backgrid and WENN.