Agência para a Integração, Migrações e Asilo
Portugal's migration agency; 525,000+ files cleared, D8 applicants still wait nine months for a card.
Portugal's migration agency saw specialised immigration courts approved on 23 July to work through 124,000 pending lawsuits against it, after cutting its case backlog to 30,000 by 1 July.
Last refreshed: 24 August 2026 · Appears in 1 active topic
How much does AIMA's backlog add to the time it takes to get Portuguese citizenship?
Timeline for Agência para a Integração, Migrações e Asilo
Faced 124,000 lawsuits over unprocessed files
Nomads & Communities: Portugal's backlog moves to the courtscleared cases toward a 30,000-case remainder
Nomads & Communities: Portugal cuts AIMA backlog to 30,000Reported 525,000-plus decisions with 473,000 positive outcomes as of 2 June 2026
Nomads & Communities: Portugal clears files, D8 wait holdsPublished cumulative backlog statistics on 2 June 2026 with no D8-specific breakdown
Nomads & Communities: Portugal counts files, lawyers count the waitMentioned in: Italy makes its nomad visa fully digital
Nomads & CommunitiesBackground
The Agência para a Integração, Migrações e Asilo (AIMA) is Portugal's migration, integration and asylum agency, created on 29 October 2023 when the government merged the former border and immigration service, Serviço de Estrangeiros e Fronteiras (SEF), with the Alto Comissariado para as Migrações, splitting enforcement from integration and asylum work. A dedicated Mission Structure, stood up in mid-2024 to clear the roughly one million cases inherited from SEF, formally concluded on 31 December 2025.
AIMA's administrative backlog has fallen sharply: officials told Parliament's Constitutional Affairs Committee on 1 July 2026 that only 30,000 cases remained, all requiring further analysis or applicant contact. Even so, immigration lawyers continue to call the government's end-2026 clearance pledge "offensive and shameless", and new D8 digital nomad Visa applicants still wait roughly nine months for a first residence card.
AIMA is now also the agency whose card-issuance timeline determines when Portugal's revised nationality law starts the citizenship clock, since that clock runs from first card issuance rather than from application.
The backlog now fights AIMA in court
Its own numbers explain why the cabinet acted: of 152,000 first-instance cases pending against AIMA, only 34% had been cleared, and a 124,000-suit litigation queue remained even after a 28-strong judicial task force worked through 22,436 files between April and June. On 23 July, ministers responded not with more staff but with a structural change: dedicated immigration and asylum courts, plus the removal of Lisbon's monopoly on hearing suits filed against the agency.
For an agency assembled in 2023 from SEF's enforcement functions and the old integration commission, spreading litigation beyond the capital is itself an admission: concentrating both processing and court venue in one place had become part of the delay, not just the caseload itself. Whether specialist judges outpace the task force's April-to-June clearance rate will decide whether this reform reaches AIMA's backlog at all, or simply relocates it.