AIMA will evaluate reported immigrant cases

The president of the Agency for Integration, Migration and Asylum (AIMA) said that a working group was created this Wednesday to evaluate the responses to notifications of voluntary abandonment.

“The processes had their dynamics and decisions and now we have a second level, internally, to reassess some of these situations here so that we have, as far as possible, the greatest certainty regarding the issues, after issuing the notifications of voluntary abandonment”, explained Pedro Portugal Gaspar, highlighting that any citizen who has been notified to leave the country can argue and contest.

The issue at stake is the protest by many immigrants and associations in the sector who contest the decision to expel them based on the automatic indication of exclusion from the Schengen Area.

To be included in these databases of names , it is necessary to have committed a crime or have a deportation notice in another EU country , which may be based on the simple termination of a regularization request.

A foreigner may have initiated a regularization process in a third country and then opted for Portugal for employment or other reasons. The process initiated is considered inadmissible and the person is no longer allowed to make new requests.

With the automatic transposition of these names from the database, this excludes the foreigner in question from applying for regularization in Portuguese territory.

“As president, I do not directly interfere in the instruction of the processes”, but “it is my responsibility to create conditions for there to be a technical assessment and even a second level to ensure uniformity of understanding”, explained Pedro Portugal Gaspar.

“We will now have to look at each case individually, in terms of these situations, with this reassessment group,” he added.

In early May, days before the election campaign , the Government announced that it would begin notifying 4,574 foreign citizens to voluntarily leave the country within 20 days .

“The Government was informed this week by AIMA that it is issuing 4,574 notifications for foreign citizens in an illegal situation to leave national territory,” said Leitão Amaro, in statements to journalists, at the Government headquarters, in Lisbon.

According to the governor, this is the first group of immigrants notified of a total of 18,000 rejections.

Leitão Amaro also warned that this is “the first set of decisions” by AIMA and that there are still “another 110 thousand processes” , stating that “most of them will be granted”, but there will “probably also be more rejections and more notifications to abandon the national territory”.

The Minister of the Presidency recalled that the majority of the cases – two thirds – concern immigrants from the Indian subcontinent.

“We are very committed, we have already given orders to the coordination, to all forces and authorities to coordinate the implementation. The Portuguese need to understand, feel and be confident that immigration policy is regulated today. The rules are to be followed […] and these people who are in this situation are people who violated Portuguese and European rules to be in European territory”, he explained.