Justice has already imposed 17 thousand appointments on AIMA for immigrants

Presidente da AIMA, Pedro Portugal Gaspar

The Portuguese judiciary has ordered the Agency for Integration, Migration, and Asylum (AIMA) to schedule 17,000 meetings with immigrants, according to the agency’s president, Pedro Portugal Gaspar, in an interview with Lusa. In response to these court orders, AIMA had to create an internal task force, as these notifications were filed by lawyers specialized in migration. Gaspar acknowledged a “significant delay on the part of the administration” in scheduling and responding to immigrants' requests.

However, the president of AIMA emphasized that these delays are not exclusive to the agency but also affect other public services, such as health and justice. Still, this legal recourse has only been used against AIMA. Since 2018, the number of foreigners in Portugal has more than doubled, which has exposed the administration's difficulty in handling the growing demand.

The rulings of the administrative courts aim to force the administration to schedule these meetings but without addressing the merit of the immigrants' regularization requests. According to Gaspar, these rulings are purely instrumental, intended to accelerate the scheduling process, and AIMA has already been ordered to comply in over 17,000 cases for not meeting the 90-day deadline to schedule appointments.

Gaspar mentioned that when his predecessor, Goes Pinheiro, assumed leadership of the mission structure, there were around 400,000 pending regularization processes by the end of 2023. The mission set a nine-month deadline to resolve this backlog. Although the bureaucratic resolution of the processes is underway, the biggest challenge remains ensuring the genuine integration of migrants into Portuguese society.

Currently, AIMA handles about 1,000 appointments per day, while the mission structure carries out around 800. It is expected that soon the combined number of daily appointments from both entities will reach 2,000, aiming to address the large backlog of pending cases.

Since the amendment to the immigration law on June 2, it has been observed that in the last four months, the number of new cases corresponds to roughly one month of the volume of interest manifestations in the previous period. On Monday, the Minister of the Presidency, Leitão Amaro, announced that requests for regularization had decreased by 80%, following the abolition of interest manifestations, a legal figure that allowed foreigners with tourist visas to work and start their regularization process. Portugal Gaspar confirmed the reduction in residence applications, explaining that this decrease is directly related to the elimination of this legal mechanism.

Fonte: msn.pt