Portuguese government announces major migrant expulsion plan

Lisbon: Lisbon has announced a major campaign to expel immigrants living in the country without authorization starting this week. The campaign is set to continue over the coming months.

On Monday, (May 5), the Portuguese government announced the beginning of a campaign to expel irregular immigrants. The first 4,500 requests to leave the country will be sent this week, but a total of some 18,000 foreigners who failed to obtain authorization to reside in Portugal are set to be expelled.

The migrants, according to government sources, are mainly from India, Pakistan, Bangladesh and Nepal. The notifications to leave the country will be part of an administrative measure with foreign citizens having 20 days to leave or appeal before the expulsion becomes mandatory.

Those who fail to comply can be taken to court and possibly detained at hosting centers for the repatriation of irregular migrants (known as CIT in Portuguese).

At the moment, Portugal only has one operational repatriation center near Porto while two others are being built using funds from the National Recovery and Resilience Plan and will not be ready until 2026.

Meanwhile the announced measure has sparked a major controversy. President Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa, while minimizing the impact of the plan compared to the number of immigrants present in the country, recalled that the Portuguese economy would collapse without them.

The left-wing opposition instead openly accused the government of demagogy ahead of a general election scheduled on May 18.

Prime Minister Luis Montenegro is “using immigration for the electoral campaign and, most of all, to ensure that the horrible performance of the government is not discussed,” declared the opposition Socialist leader Pedro Nuno Santos.

Organizations working to host migrants have said that many foreigners are residing in the country irregularly because of the delay accumulated by Portuguese authorities during the timeframe between the shutdown of the Service for foreigners and borders (SEF) and the creation of the new Agency for integration, migration and asylum (AIMA).

The complex passage took place in 2023 at a time when immigration increased in Portugal. Indeed the number of foreigners in the country quadrupled between 2017 and 2024 — from 4 percent to 15 percent of the population.

The year with the highest number of registered expulsions was 2019 with some 4,800 such orders issued, compared to the 4,500 to be notified this week alone, according to official data.