WASHINGTON, D.C. – When the hunger headaches get strong, Lenka Mendoza focuses on why she is fasting and dreams of what she would do if she won the right to legally live and work in the U.S.: She would return to her home country, Peru, to hug her cancer-stricken mom.

Mendoza, an undocumented mother of three who works as a motel housekeeper, is one of about a dozen activists fasting on the National Mall near the U.S. Capitol. The fasters want the House of Representatives to vote on legislation that would grant some 11 million undocumented immigrants a path to citizenship. The bill was approved earlier this year by the Senate but has met stiff resistance in the GOP-controlled House.

The “Fast for Families,” organized by faith, immigration and labor groups, began on Nov. 12. Four activists who went nearly 22 days without eating ended their fast last Tuesday. About a dozen others, including Mendoza, are carrying on with the strike, some fasting for one to several days at a time, others indefinitely, in the hope that they can compel Republican leadership in the House to bring the bill to a vote…

“And us being here, we are moving the power of God’s hands for this country, for good things, for a good change,” Mendoza, 42, of Dumfries, Va., said in Spanish through a translator on her fourth day of fasting.