AIMA Reimposes the 10-Senha Daily Cap on Lawyers at the Porto Loja With a 12h–16h Window — Three Cases Per Advogado Per Day Against a 200,000-File Court Backlog, Less Than a Year After the National Cap Was Lifted by Protocol With the Ordem

The Agência para a Integração, Migrações e Asilo has quietly reimposed the ten-senha daily cap on lawyers at its Porto loja, with access squeezed into a four-hour 12h–16h window. Público's Vicente Nunes reads the new rule on the ground on Saturday 10 May: ten passwords distributed at midday, against the roughly thirty-five advogados who used to circulate through the Porto loja on a normal day. With each advogado typically able to advance three cases per visit, the practical ceiling on Porto residency files moved through advocacy channels falls from low-three-figure case-flow to about thirty cases a day — set against a backlog that the courts have already pushed past 200,000 immigration processes. AIMA denies any “limitação,” frames the move as “operational” and says “não foi implementada qualquer medida de limitação de acesso dirigida a advogados ou solicitadores.”

What the rule does

The Porto loja now distributes ten daily senhas to lawyers, handed out at midday, with the lawyers' service window running from 12h to 16h. Outside that window, advogados queueing on residency files compete with the general walk-in queue. The ten-senha cap had been the national rule through early 2025, but was lifted under a code of good practices signed between AIMA and the Ordem dos Advogados last April after a Porto-led protest. The May 2026 reimposition is — for now — Porto-specific. AIMA's written response to Público says “a organização do atendimento presencial insere-se na gestão operacional diária das lojas, sendo ajustada em função da capacidade instalada” and that “estes ajustamentos, quando ocorrem, são operacionais e visam salvaguardar a continuidade do serviço público.”

The arithmetic of three-cases-per-day

Lawyers consulted by Público describe the per-visit case ceiling as roughly three files: in a four-hour window, with documents to compile, biometrics to align and AIMA staff to walk through, three is what an advogado can realistically advance. Ten passwords times three cases is thirty Porto residency files routed through advocacy in a working day — an order of magnitude below what the loja was clearing during the post-protocol period when up to 35 advogados circulated freely. The relevant denominator is the 200,000-file backlog now sitting inside the administrative courts, an inheritance of the SEF–AIMA transition that pushed roughly 400,000 pending applications onto the new agency's books in 2023. Cap the advocacy channel into the Porto loja and the bottleneck migrates to the courts: that is the mechanical complaint of the Porto bar.

The lawyers' reaction

Immigration-law specialist Catarina Zuccaro, quoted in Público, says “é estranha essa limitação imposta pela AIMA no posto de atendimento no Porto” — a measured framing that flags the inconsistency with the April 2025 protocol rather than escalating to a direct accusation. Advogada Taciana Flores reads the downstream impact more sharply: “a AIMA vai prejudicar, sobretudo, os imigrantes que representamos.” The structural argument across both quotes is the same one that drove the April 2025 manifestation organised by Elaine Linhares: lawyers have a mandato forense and the carteiras that recognise consultation rights, and limiting their physical access to the loja is a back-door limitation on those rights — even where AIMA refuses to label the rule as such.

Why the Ordem is quiet

Ordem dos Advogados president João Massano did not respond to Público's requests on Saturday. The Ordem's lever-set with AIMA is currently a mix of cooperation and friction: the April 2025 code of good practices is the cooperative side, and a parallel financial dispute is the friction. Massano told Público on 21 April that AIMA owes lawyers around €244,000 in unpaid residency-processing fees (AIMA's own number is closer to €200,000), with individual lawyer arrears running up to €2,500 per case. The fee itself — €7.50 per residency process under the AIMA–Ordem protocol — Massano has called “quase insultuoso.” The Porto reimposition lands while that financial file is still open.

What it means for foreign residents in Porto

For the Brazilian, Indian, Nepali, Bangladeshi and Cape Verdean residency files that dominate the Porto loja's caseload, the practical read is straightforward: the advocacy lane just narrowed. Files that would otherwise have been pushed forward through an advogado will now compete for the same general-walk-in queue or move through the digital portal. For complex files — irregular-stay regularisations, family-reunification disputes, expulsion notifications — that is a meaningful procedural shift, because the advocacy lane was the one that produced documented case-by-case interactions with AIMA staff. The shift also lands inside the broader Porto-loja stress pattern: it is the loja that handles the densest residency-file mix in the north, and it is the loja that has produced the most contentious queue scenes since the agency's launch.

Where this goes

If the Porto rule holds, the next move is at the Ordem level: a formal communication to AIMA's board, the option of a Livro Amarelo entry by individual lawyers, and — if the file escalates — a return of the April 2025 protest playbook now adapted to Porto. AIMA's narrow defence is that the rule is operational rather than a limitation; the Ordem's likely line is that, in practice, capping access at ten advogados a day in a four-hour window is a limitation, irrespective of how it is labelled. The political ceiling on the dispute is set by the broader AIMA reform debate already moving through Parliament — and by the fact that the Porto loja sits at the heart of one of the densest residency-file pipelines in the country. A second protest in Porto, if it materialises, would land inside a Concertação Social and labour-reform calendar already saturated with parallel disputes.

Sources: Público (10 May 2026, Vicente Nunes); Público (21 April 2026, on AIMA arrears to lawyers); Público (17 April 2025, on the protocol that lifted the national 10-senha cap); AIMA written response cited in the 10 May 2026 Público report; Ordem dos Advogados public statements via Público.