“We had 18 thousand rejections, but now they are almost 24 thousand”, said the Minister of the Presidency, António Leitão Amaro, who also mentioned that they had notified almost a thousand people.

In a press conference regarding AIMA pending situations and the first year on the Plan of Action for Migrations, the minister affirmed that the process “has already accelerated” last week, because it is “in semi-automatic emission process.”

“[The process] is becoming faster and all those 33 thousand – unless another reason is found (…) will receive a notification for voluntary abandonment”, said the minister, who added that AIMA is sending almost two thousand notifications a day.

At the beginning of May, AIMA notified 18,000 foreign citizens, a number that has now doubled. The minister stated that the notification, under Portuguese law, allows the voluntary abandonment of the country. A coercive measure is only applied when needed.

There are 33,983 rejection processes, being most of them related to Indian citizens (13,466). From the 184.059 already decided processes, there is the rejection of 5.386 Brazilian citizens, 3,750 from Bangladesh, 3,279 from Nepal, 3,005 from Pakistan, 236 Colombian citizens, and 1,054 citizens from Algeria. Still from South America. 234 citizens from Venezuela and 180 from Argentina. There are also registered 603 rejected processes for Moroccan people and 2,790 from other nationalities.

The Government says that the rejection tax is set at 18,5%, with 150,076 rejected processes.