The Government wants to conclude the pending processes of thousands of immigrants and hand over a clean file to the Portuguese Agency for Migrations and Asylum (APMA), which will be responsible for dealing with the authorisations for these immigrants to stay in national territory.

In this sense, the Government wants to create temporary regularisation centres and call in immigrants who have been waiting for several months, or years, to be received by the Foreigners and Borders Service (SEF), whose extinction is still scheduled for 31 March, according to Sapo, in which they cite a report by Expresso.

Currently, SEF has between 290 and 300 thousand pending immigrant processes and it is estimated that half no longer have any effect, because people have already left Portugal. According to Expresso, the government will use the spaces used for the granting of residence permits to British citizens (after Brexit) and also places that were used to vaccinate the population against Covid-19. The Telheiras vaccination centre (Lisbon) has even been visited and analysed by SEF officials to serve this "mega operation".

Cited by Expresso, Artur Jorge Girão, president of the Union of SEF Employees (SINSEF), warns that the main problem is the "shortage of staff" and argues that, for the operation to happen, is necessary the "collaboration of other institutions". The objective was for SEF to hand over the "clean file" to APMA by the end of March - when the entity takes on this role - but, every day, around 900 new expressions of interest to reside in Portugal (almost 27.000 requests per month) are received. According to a source heard by the newspaper, it would take at least four months to deal with the backlog.