In a press conference at the end of the Council of Ministers meeting, António Leitão Amaro said that the Agency for Integration, Migration and Asylum (AIMA), with around 400,000 pending administrative processes for regularizing immigrants, “will have its operations centres to assist and resolve these pending issues in operation in September, in various parts of the country, with the largest centre located in Lisbon”.

“This Government has the answer to the 400,000 pending issues, although they may not be that many, many may have already left the country in despair due to the lack of response from the Portuguese State. We promised and created a mission structure, which is working, contracting spaces with local authorities, other entities and NGOs [Non-Governmental Organizations], with the Orders, so that we have service centers and back-office teams to start processing these processes much more quickly”, said the Minister of the Presidency.

Asked about the strike by AIMA workers, who refuse to work any more overtime until the end of the year in protest against the lack of resources in view of the accumulated work, the Minister associated the stoppage with “a malaise generated by the extinction of the Immigration and Borders Service (SEF)” and the way in which the transition to AIMA was carried out.

“It is true, we cannot but agree, I have mentioned this several times, the way in which SEF was extinguished, in a slow death, and how AIMA was weakened by the previous Government was profoundly wrong”, said Leitão Amaro.

The minister pointed out a “concern about immigrants who chose Portugal and who over the last seven years have submitted requests to the Portuguese State, many of them in accordance with the law, that have not been answered”, stating that “the expression of chaos”, used by union representatives and cited by Leitão Amaro to describe the situation experienced at AIMA, “may perhaps apply”.

Regarding the payment of overtime, demanded by the striking workers, the minister said that “whatever is legal and due, naturally, the State is a good person and will pay”, adding that the agency “does not have a shortage of financial resources, it has a shortage of human resources”.

“We have measures, we have allocated resources and together we will resolve yet another dramatic problem, disrespectful to many human beings, that we received from the previous government, which failed blatantly in this matter”, criticised the minister, who assured that unions and the Government are in contact.

Still on the subject of the service centres that will start operating in September, Leitão Amaro stressed that this is “an extraordinarily complex operation, because it involves administrative aspects, processing and checking documentation and then providing face-to-face service, re-verification, collecting biometric data and subsequently issuing documents”.

“We recognise the extraordinarily difficult situation in which the AIMA staff were placed. There was a structure, the SEF, which had a broad group of workers with various skills, and the SEF was dismantled”, said the minister, who also mentioned that the dismantling of teams with specialised skills from the SEF justified the creation of new teams “that would somehow restore the skills that existed”.

The mission structure includes a one-year reinforcement of 300 members for the AIMA and will be in place until 2 June 2025 and includes two types of reinforcements.