According to Leitão Amaro, AIMA will have solved 1 million pending cases by the beginning of 2026. He claims that in 2026 the agency will work “without a backpack”, referring to the delayed processes.
The Minister of the Presidency, António Leitão Amaro, announced on Wednesday (24/9), that the Agency for Integration, Migration and Asylum (AIMA), will have resolved all cases in arrears by the beginning of next year. "AIMA will arrive in 2026 without the backpack," he said at the press conference in which he announced the new proposal for changes to the Foreigners Act (Law 23/2007), which had been rejected by the Constitutional Court.
According to the minister, it will be an unprecedented accomplishment on the part of public services. "The Portuguese state will be responsible for one of the greatest achievements of the last decades. We, in this year, have dealt with 900 thousand late cases. There are 440 thousand of the manifestations of interest, 220 thousand of CPLP residences (Community of Portuguese-Speaking Countries), plus the renewals by decree-law, plus those of the transitional regime", he counts.
Since the beginning of July, the mission structure of AIMA is dealing with the cases of residence permit renewals that expired between February 20, 2020 and June 30, 2025. There are 374 thousand residence permits that had their validity extended until October 15. With just over 20 days to finish this deadline, there are no indications yet whether they will be extended again.
Leitão Amaro sought to present an example that the institution is working well. "There are currently no queues at the AIMA, other than in the morning, when it opens the agency," it said.
He presented data specifying how the regularization of the processes was done. He said that the AIMA was responsible for about 200 thousand processes and that the mission structure dealt with more than 600 thousand.
To ensure that the situation is resolved, the minister stated that an investment is being made to improve the capacity of AIMA. It cited, for example, the technological development of the agency, the increase of service capacity, and the improvement of telephone service.
Some of the difficulties experienced by immigrants should be corrected, said Leitão Amaro. “As we solve everything, some cases continue to appear. There are scheduling errors, cards that took time to arrive, cards sent to the wrong address. Whatever is shared with us, we are here to resolve," he assured.
After comparing with the situation that existed before the Government of which it is part, in which the care of immigrants did not work and in which hundreds of thousands of cases accumulated for years, he points out that there will always be something that will not work. "We do not promise that tomorrow there will be zero problems or that there will be no waiting to be taken care of. That doesn't exist," he says.
Regarding the case in which a Brazilian hairdresser had her salon invaded by a team of the Foreigners and Borders Unit of the Public Security Police, without a court order and the employees and clients were obliged to identify themselves, he refused the comparison with the United States immigration police, the ICE. "It's a figure without the slightest fit in reality. There is not the slightest possible comparison between what is being done in Portugal and people who drag, deport immigrants in droves. We're building a country we don't put against each other. There are no images of mass deportation in Portugal. And no one does a good service in Portugal when passing this image," he observes.