The Huffington Post reported that as long as the Defense of Marriage Act is in effect, same-sex binational couples won’t be able to petition for the foreign-born partner to receive legal status. In the meantime, though, a group pushing the Obama administration to delay decisions on green card applications won a small victory last week when a judge ordered a stay on its lawsuit against the government.

Five same-sex couples, some with visas and some without, were named in the challenge against DOMA filed April 2 by advocacy group Immigration Equality and the law firm of Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison LLP. It contends that “[s]olely because of DOMA and its unconstitutional discrimination against same-sex couples, these Plaintiffs are being denied the immigration rights afforded to other similarly situated binational couples.”

For those couples, that means one member may be required to leave the country periodically, sometimes for six months at a time, before returning on a temporary visa. Others can’t leave at all because they would have no avenue by which to return. Still others could be separated should the partner who is a foreign citizen lose a job that gives work authorization.

Binational heterosexual couples have different rights. The partner who is a U.S. citizen can apply for legal status for their foreign-born spouse even if they are undocumented, although that makes it more difficult.

The judge’s decision, which was issued Wednesday and reported to the plaintiffs Friday, does not mean the couples will be granted visas or green cards, but it does mean they will be unlikely to face separation as the stay is pending and other DOMA suits are considered. The two-sentence order declared, “[t]he case is stayed pending the Second Circuit’s resolution of Windsor v. United States.”

The case is part of a broader push for equal immigration rights for same-sex couples. Immigration Equality renewed its call for reform in a letter sent Friday to President Barack Obama and Attorney General Eric Holder. In the letter, which was provided to The Huffington Post, the group points out that a challenge to the Defense of Marriage Act will end up at the Supreme Court.

“We are writing now because the circumstances surrounding DOMA have changed considerably since we first raised this issue a year ago,” Executive Director Rachel Tiven and Legal Director Victoria Neilson wrote. “We believe that you should therefore reconsider your prior decision not to hold green cards in abeyance.”

“We … are asking that the status quo be broadly maintained — that the green cards for all lesbian and gay immigrant families be neither approved nor denied until there is a final resolution of the constitutionality of DOMA,” they wrote.

One couple named in the suit has received at least a little relief from immigration woes, but wants a permanent solution. Tim Smulian, a citizen of South Africa, and his husband Edwin Blesch, a U.S. citizen, found out in February that Smulian could stay in the U.S. temporarily without leaving based on limits on his visa. Smulian previously lived in the United States six months on, six months off on a tourist visa. Despite that reprieve, they want full rights that will maintain that reality.

“We do see it as the beginning of the light at the end of the tunnel,” Blesch said when Smulian received deportation relief in February. “We were getting pretty hopeless for a while there. This is a wonderful development for us, and it takes away the day-to-day worry every morning when we get up, ‘What’s going to happen now?’”

The National Journal reported that more than a dozen states use E-Verify to check the immigration status of new hires or government contractors, but a study has found that state officials have not been implementing the policy uniformly.

Some states use the free, Internet-based system that allows employers to check the eligibility of new hires to work in the United States by running their Social Security number and date of birth through millions of government records to verify the status of all employees, while other states use it for government employees only, according to the new report by the Center for Immigration Studies, a group that supports reduced immigration.

Six state require that all or nearly all employers use E-Verify, according to a CIS study.

Five states mandate that new government employees and contractors’ information be run against the database, according to the CIS report. Several counties in Washington state use the system, even though it is not mandated by the state.

Pennsylvania, starting in January, is requiring employers in construction public works projects to use E-verify, said Jessica M. Vaughan, director of policy studies at CIS. Penalties for failing to provide verification can range from $250 to $1,000.

“I have been surprised that more states are not looking to expand it beyond the public employees and public contractors,” Vaughan said. South Carolina is the only state that conducts audits to ensure businesses comply, she said.

Auditing, which is done by the state, ensures that employers have a level playing field, Vaughan said. Without it, some employers could be motivated to hire undocumented immigrants, presumably to reduce their labor costs, she said. “That’s going to breed frustration with the law” among those who are using E-verify, she said.

More than 387,000 employers use the E-Verify system, according to U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services data. Some 1,200 new businesses sign up each week.

Although the earliest version of E-Verify legislation was signed in 2007, according to the new CIS report, the bulk of the laws were passed in 2010 and 2011, making it too early to examine the overall effectiveness of E-Verify since the policies were implemented only a few years ago.

Last year a bill was introduced that would require nearly every employer in the country to use E-Verify. Nonetheless, the system has its share of critics. If made mandatory nationwide, it could cost thousands of dollars to train personnel how to use it, as well as lost tax revenue and other monetary burdens, according to the Center for American Progress, a left-leaning think tank.

A 2010 Government Accountability Office report also found that persistent errors can surface from misspellings or slight mismatches of names on E-Verify documents and in its database, creating problems for thousands of workers. The accuracy rate during fiscal 2006, when the data were examined, was 97.4 percent, according to the GAO report.

The Center for American Progress estimates that 770,000 workers who are authorized to work in the United States could potentially lose their jobs. In addition, naturalized U.S. citizens are 30 times more likely than those born here to experience an E-Verify error.

CIS’s Vaughan said the federal government has improved E-verify to reduce the chances of error for those who are naturalized citizens.

Washington state, which is not required to use E-Verify but has at least 11 counties that do, recently introduced a bill to stop cities and counties from requiring employers to use the database, according to a story in The Columbian. The reason: It’s crippling the agriculture industry and hurting legal immigrants.

Reuters reported that a few hundred protesters, some toting placards reading “Migration is a Human Right,” marched in Phoenix on Saturday to protest Arizona’s two-year-old crackdown on illegal immigration.

“I feel like we’re singled out,” said Angel Diaz, 33, an artist among 200 to 300 mostly Hispanic protesters rallying in a park ahead of the protest march.

The Huffington Post reported that Mark Pongo, a 32-year-old immigrant from Ghana, was released from detention earlier this month after 16 months — or about 487 days — away from his U.S. citizen wife and friends, during which his case languished in courts with record-high backlogs.

“It was crazy. I was just waiting to get my case done with,” Pongo said. “I was over it. I was just waiting.”

The backlog of immigration cases is at an all-time high of 314,147, according to data up to the end of June 2012, released last week by Syracuse University’s Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse. That figure is up 5.6 percent this year and 20 percent since the end of the 2010 fiscal year, with the average wait time climbing to 526 days.

For those in immigrant detention, that means more time away from their families, friends and freedom, until they are eventually deported or given legal status to stay in the United States.

Parastoo Zahedi, Pongo’s attorney, has been an immigration lawyer for 20 years. She said she can see the difference as wait times grow, with more people lined up outside the crowded courtrooms. She took on Pongo’s case pro bono after it sat without movement for months when he and his wife could no longer afford another attorney. With representation — which many detained immigrants do not have — his case moved more quickly.

After being released, Pongo is waiting for work authorization and eventually hopes to become a soccer coach. Soccer was the reason he chose to overstay his visa and remain in the United States in the first place, he said — he decided to stay and try out for teams when he should have gone back to Ghana. He was detained after three DUIs, but has since received counseling and given up alcohol, he said.

“They need to try to speed it up a little bit,” Pongo said. “When some people go to court they come back and say they’re going to get a decision, and the decision takes like three months. Some people have been in there waiting for a decision for a long time.”

It could be worse. The biggest backlogs are in Los Angeles, where 52,053 cases were pending as of June 28, and New York City, with 43,780. Los Angeles also has the longest wait times at 755 days.

Still, the long delays in Virginia and Maryland, where Zahedi does most of her work, are damaging. There were 9,174 cases pending as of June 28 in Virginia, which also handles cases from the District of Columbia. In Maryland, 5,036 people were waiting for their cases to be resolved.

One of Zahedi’s clients came from Iraq to apply for asylum, but was detained at the airport. She was eventually released on parole, but her individual hearing won’t be until February 2013, Zahedi said. Another client, who was admitted to the country as a refugee in 2003, was picked up by Immigration and Customs Enforcement in June 2011 and had a final hearing in June 2012, when he was told he could stay.

“They need to do something, perhaps adding more judges to the courts,” Zahedi said. “There are a limited number of judges. For Virginia, we don’t have enough judges, and their calendars are full.”

The American Immigration Council reported that who uses H-1Bs and for what types of jobs is a topic of constant debate in Congress and in communities across the country. The Brookings Institute recently released a new report mapping H-1B workers in the U.S which addresses some of these questions and sheds new light on the topic. The H-1B program allows employers to hire foreign workers in specialty occupations for a temporary period of time. Currently, H-1Bs for for-profit employers are capped at 65,000 per year, with an additional 20,000 visas for workers with advanced degrees from U.S. universities. Research, non-profit, and government organizations can also request H-1B workers, and those visas are uncapped. Workers in the fields of science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) are the most highly sought after foreign workers. STEM occupations make up 64 percent of all H-1B requests, even though these jobs comprised only 5.4 percent of national employment in 2010. Among research and nonprofit uncapped employers, life scientists, postsecondary teachers, and health care workers are the most requested workers. Computer occupations, engineers, and financial specialists are the most requested workers from corporate, capped employers. While many have looked at discrepancies between the demand for H-1Bs and the supply, Brookings examined the H-1B population by metropolitan area, and the results were eye-opening. Brookings found that 106 metropolitan areas in the U.S. account for 91 percent of all H-1B requests, yet these areas contain only 67 percent of U.S. jobs. As might be expected, the New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, San Jose, and Washington DC metro areas make up the top five metro areas in terms of H-1B demand. The New York metro area alone accounts for 16 percent of all H-1B applications. But there are other metro areas — like Rochester, MN and Columbus, IN—that also have a surprisingly high demand for H-1Bs. In Rochester, the Mayo Clinic is the major driver of demand for H-1Bs that are not subject to the annual cap. In Columbus, a city with a population of 75,000, the manufacturing sector accounts for the demand. Cummins Inc. is Columbus’s largest employer and accounts for an overwhelming share of H-1B requests from the metro area. In fact, the top 5 employers in the Columbus metro area account for nearly 90 percent of H-1B requests from that metro area while in the New York metro area, the top 5 employers account for less than 5 percent of all H-1B requests. Finally, Brookings looked at the distribution of H-1B fees paid by employers. Surcharges levied by Congress to the basic H-1B application fees are designated to fund programs to address skill shortages in the U.S. workforce. Brookings found that between 2001 and 2011, the U.S. government collected more than $1 billion in visa fees to put toward workforce development. These funds are distributed through the Department of Labor’s Employment and Training Administration and the National Science Foundation. Brookings found that this money is not necessarily going to the areas that have exhibited the highest demand for highly-skilled foreign-born workers. Among the 106 high demand metro areas, Wichita, KS; Portland, ME; and El Paso, TX received the highest amount of money relative to their H-1B demand. Other metro areas that request much higher numbers of H-1B workers received less money. Brookings recommends that these grant programs use better local data to effectively target the funding in areas where it is most needed. While providing a more comprehensive picture of the H-1B program, this new report also highlights continuing questions about the U.S. immigration system and temporary high-skilled visas. It raises important questions about how we calculate demand for visas in the long-term and provides the makings of a constructive conversation if and when Congress is ready to discuss immigration reform.

The National Journal reported that he world will watch the colorful pageantry of the world’s top athletes assembling in London on Friday for the 2012 Olympics. And while all members of Team U.S.A. are U.S. citizens, more than 40 of the nearly 600 athletes representing the United States are foreign-born.

Though the U.S. Olympic Committee doesn’t track whether these athletes have dual citizenship, birthplaces are documented. The participants this year come from countries ranging from Brazil and Russia to Kenya and Eritrea.

More than a dozen native Asians and Pacific Islanders represent the U.S. this summer, according to a story in New America Media, counting both those born in the U.S. to immigrant parents as well as immigrants who are now U.S. citizens.

One athlete, volleyball star Foluke Akinradewo, who was born in Canada to Nigerian parents, is a citizen of three countries.

For some, obtaining their citizenship has been one of the most challenging parts of participating in the Olympics. Russian-born Mariya Koroleva qualified for the national synchronized swimming team after she got her U.S. citizenship. She has said that the hardest part of participating in the Olympics was awaiting confirmation of citizenship.

Runner Kerron Clement, who was born in Trinidad and Tobago, said he recalled dreaming of running since he was a child and living in the Caribbean.

“I didn’t have the resources nor was able to take advantage of my true athletic ability at a very young age,” he said, according to NBCOlympics.com. “I simply just chased my older brother, Charles Clement, and that developed my speed and endurance.”

Also representing the U.S. are a runner from Somalia and tennis player from South Africa.

Distance runner Abdi Abdirahman, who was born in Somalia, will make his fourth Olympic appearance in London. He immigrated to the U.S. in 1990 after escaping civil war. Since his father worked for a U.S. oil company and supported the 1992 intervention of U.S. military troops in Somalia, Abdirahman and his family had to flee. He became a permanent in 1999, and took the citizenship oath in 2000.

Abdirahman started running in 1996 while a student at Pima Community College in Tucson, Ariz. “I just wanted to do something,” he said. After running in his first 5,000-meter race, he decided to continue with the sport, according to his biography.

Born in Durban, South Africa, Liezel Huber came to the U.S. in 1992 to enroll in a tennis academy in South Carolina. She met the man who would become her husband, tennis pro Tony Huber. The couple moved to his hometown in Houston and married in 2000. Seven years later, Huber became a naturalized U.S. citizen.

Rollcall.com reported that Senate Majority Whip Dick Durbin is calling on supporters of the DREAM Act to encourage Republicans to take up the cause.

The Associated Press reported that the Obama administration’s new plan to grant temporary work permits to many young, illegal immigrants who otherwise could be deported may cost more than $585 million and require hiring hundreds of new federal employees to process more than 1 million anticipated requests, according to internal documents obtained by The Associated Press.

The Homeland Security Department plans, marked “not for distribution,” describe steps that immigrants will need to take — including a $465 paperwork fee designed to offset the program’s cost — and how the government will manage it. Illegal immigrants can request permission to stay in the country under the plan by filing a document, “Request for Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals,” and simultaneously apply for a work permit starting Aug. 15.

Under the new program, which President Barack Obama announced last month, eligible immigrants must have arrived in the U.S. before their 16th birthday, are 30 or younger, have been living here at least five years, are in school or graduated or served in the military. They also must not have a criminal record or otherwise pose a safety threat. They can apply to stay in the country and be granted a work permit for two years, but they would not be granted citizenship.

The internal government plans obtained by the AP provide the first estimates of costs, how many immigrants were expected to participate and how long it might take for them. It was not immediately clear whether or under which circumstances any immigrants would not be required to pay the $465 paperwork fee. The plans said there would be no waivers, but Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano told Congress last week that the government would grant waivers “in very deserving cases.” She said details were still being worked out.

“We anticipate that this will be a fee-driven process,” Napolitano said.

A spokesman for the Homeland Security Department, Peter Boogaard, said the plans obtained by the AP were “preliminary documents” and the process is still being worked out. Boogaard said processing immigrant applications under the program “will not use taxpayer dollars” because of the fees that will be collected.

Fee waivers could dramatically affect the government’s share of the cost. The plans said that, depending on how many applicants don’t pay, the government could lose between $19 million and $121 million. Republican critics pounced on that.

“By lowering the fee or waiving it altogether for illegal immigrants, those who play by the rules will face delays and large backlogs as attention is diverted to illegal immigrants,” said House Judiciary Committee Chairman Lamar Smith, R-Texas. “American taxpayers should not be forced to bail out illegal immigrants and President Obama’s fiscally irresponsible policies.”

U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services estimated it could receive more than 1 million applications during the first year of the program, or more than 3,000 per day. It would cost between $467 million and $585 million to process applications in the first two years of the program, with revenues from fees paid by immigrants estimated at $484 million, according to the plans. That means the cost to the government could range from a gain of $16 million to a loss of more than $101 million.

The government estimated that as many as 890,000 immigrants in the first year would be immediately eligible to avoid deportation. The remaining 151,000 immigrants would likely be rejected as ineligible.

The plans estimated that the Homeland Security Department could need to hire more than 1,400 full-time employees, as well as contractors, to process the applications. Salaries were included in the agency’s estimates of total program costs.

Once immigrants submit their applications, it could take between two and 10 days for the Homeland Security Department to scan and file it. It could take up to four weeks longer to make an appointment for immigrants to submit their fingerprints and take photographs. A subsequent background check could take six more weeks, then three more months for the government to make its final decision before a work permit would be issued.

Napolitano said new information about the program should be made available by Aug. 1. She has said immigrants would generally not be detained by immigration authorities while their application is pending.