In an interview with journalists, lawyer Elaine Linhares explained that this protest aims to end the “limitation on the professional practice of law” at AIMA.

Every day, there are limited passwords in each store for lawyers, who are unable to deal with simple administrative procedures, said the Brazilian lawyer, who has worked in Portugal for six years.

At the Lisbon office, where the protest that brought together a dozen lawyers took place, there are only ten tickets available per day for lawyers and this means that many have to travel at dawn to be seen, as the spaces are filled long before the doors open at 9:00.

“What are we going to tell our clients if we don’t have access to the store, which is open and we have this limitation?”, asked the lawyer.

“No response”

The group of lawyers asked to be heard by the AIMA management, but so far has not received a response.

“Yesterday we had a colleague who came from the Algarve, she came at dawn, at 4am, and she even said that she wasn’t sure she would be lucky enough to be among the top ten”, explained Elaine Linhares, considering that the lack of access constitutes a “limitation to the work of lawyers who work with immigrants”.

Other means of contact do not provide any response: “The email is deleted, the call center does not answer, letters are not answered. So the only [possible] means of communication is our presence here, in person.”

In recent months, legal actions to demand compliance with administrative requests have increased due to the lack of response, but even if the use of the courts increases, administrative acts are still necessary, such as consulting a process.

“We don’t have access to anything,” the lawyer complained.

“This inertia causes limitations for immigrants” who “have no documents, no guarantees for anything, because, without documents, the person is invisible, an undocumented person who cannot leave Portugal, cannot have access to healthcare, cannot do anything”, accused Elaine Linhares.

Without documents, a citizen is “non-existent, but continues to pay taxes and work”, he added, highlighting that the State receives the money for the documents, but then does not respond.

Another of the leaders of this movement, Patrícia Viana, accuses AIMA of not responding to the lawyers' complaints, which have been going on for a long time.

According to administrative law, “we have the right to priority access to consultation of processes, because we are here defending the constitutional rights of our clients, but we simply arrive here, we do not have the right to consultation”, stated the lawyer.

Furthermore, “we don’t even have a complaints book”, as is the rule in public administration.

“I tried to make a complaint, but they gave me a blank sheet of paper,” explained Patrícia Viana.

Lusa news agency tried to obtain a comment on this protest and the complaints from the AIMA management but has not yet received a response.