The president of the Agency for Integration, Migration and Asylum (AIMA), Luís Goes Pinheiro, will be heard today by parliament on the workings of the agency, which is trying to regularize the 400,000 pending immigrant cases in the country.
Created in October 2023, AIMA is responsible for completing the process of regularizing new immigrants, a controversial situation given that there are thousands of pending issues and a threat of almost a quarter of the agency’s staff leaving, as part of civil service mobility.
On October 29, AIMA absorbed the functions of the former Aliens and Borders Service (SEF) and the High Commission for Migration (ACM), a merger that was contested by the then opposition (at the time the PS governed with an absolute majority), a criticism that has intensified in recent months due to the organization’s inability to recover the number of pending cases.
The Action Plan for Migration, now announced by the PSD/CDS government, kept the institute public, took away its powers to order the return of immigrants and gave it new powers to renew documents.
The current government also decided to keep Luís Goes Pinheiro, who had been the PS’s Assistant Secretary of State for Administrative Modernization, as AIMA’s president.
In an interview with Lusa, Goes Pinheiro insisted that only the modernization of the IT system and the updating of the scheduling model would make procedures easier and make it possible to recover the time lost in backlogs.
The hearing, which will take place in the Committee on Constitutional Affairs, Rights, Freedoms and Guarantees, is being held at the request of the BE and Livre.
