AIMA Reopens the Family-Reunification Portal for CPLP Minor Children — First Concrete Step Out of the Reagrupamento Freeze, Ten Days After Lula's Visit and on the Back of Roughly 220,000 Title Exchanges Cleared Through Spring

Ten days before President Lula touched down in Lisbon for his five-day state visit, the Agência para a Integração, Migrações e Asilo quietly switched a piece of its services portal back on. As of 18 April 2026, citizens of Community of Portuguese Language Countries — Brazil, Cape Verde, Angola, Mozambique, São Tomé, Guinea-Bissau, Equatorial Guinea and Timor-Leste — can once again submit family-reunification applications for minor children resident in Portugal. It is the first concrete crack in the reagrupamento familiar freeze that AIMA had run since the new Lei dos Estrangeiros tightened the rules in late 2025.

The reopening is narrow on purpose. Only minor children — under-18s and dependent incapable persons — qualify under the relaunched portal, and only where one of the parents already holds valid residence in Portugal under a CPLP title. Spousal reunification, ascendant reunification, and reunification for adult children still require the full residence-and-cohabitation evidence track that the legislation imposes from January.

The 220,000-title backlog that had to clear first

The freeze did not start as a policy choice. It started in early 2025 when the European Commission rejected the original CPLP residence card as non-compliant with the EU document-security standard introduced under the Schengen Acquis revision. Around 220,000 titles fell into a re-issue loop while AIMA scrambled to print plastic cards on the harmonised template. Family-reunification processing was suspended on the simple operational ground that the agency could not verify the underlying residence status of the sponsor while the cards themselves were in flux.

By mid-April the agency had cleared the bulk of the exchange — "a maioria", in the language used in the press briefing — which freed enough caseworker capacity to switch the minor-children track back on without breaking the rest of the portal. Reagrupamento for spouses, parents and adult dependents remains on hold pending the second-phase rollout that the Ministry of Internal Administration has promised for later in 2026.

What changes for applicants under the new law

The diploma that took effect at the start of the year inherited the family-reunification chapter from the previous Lei de Estrangeiros and tightened it in three specific places. First, the sponsor must hold a valid residence authorisation that has been live for at least two years for general reunification — though the threshold drops to 15 months when the spouse can prove 18 months of cohabitation in the country of origin. Second, dependent ascendants now have to demonstrate financial dependency on the sponsor through documentary evidence rather than a sworn declaration. Third, the appeal track for refused reunification applications has been streamlined into a single instance.

Minor children — the segment AIMA reopened on 18 April — face none of these tightenings. The legislative carve-out exists because Portugal is signatory to the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child and to the Council of Europe convention on family reunification, both of which set a higher bar for restricting parent-child reunion than the EU Family Reunification Directive sets for adults.

What the diaspora is watching for next

The two unanswered questions at the end of last week were the timeline for the spousal-reunification reopening and the technical roadmap for migrating the legacy AIMA backlog onto the new portal architecture. The Brazilian community — by far the largest single national group inside the CPLP cohort — is also waiting to see whether the new Mercosul-EU trade framework starting 1 May produces any spillover into the immigration channel, particularly for intra-corporate transferees that the old SEF regime processed under a different annex.