Foreigners Awaiting Removal Are Being Held in PSP Station Cells as Portugal's Detention Centres Run Out of Places

Ten foreign nationals awaiting removal from Portugal are being held in cells at PSP (Public Security Police) stations, because the centres where the law says they should be detained have no free places. RTP reported on 15 October that some have been in the cells for several days, and that a week earlier the number was 19.

RTP said it had seen documents in which the PSP repeatedly asked the Lisbon court to review the measures imposed on these people, citing the "insufficiency of the installed national capacity" and accepting that it could not guarantee these people the rights the law gives them. One passage read out in the report says the premises have no outdoor areas or safe spaces where detainees can move about outside the cells, and no way to provide for personal hygiene over a long stay, "namely the possibility of taking a shower". The PSP wrote that it had "well-founded reservations" about whether keeping people there was materially and legally adequate.

According to RTP, more than 50 people have been sent to the centres since the start of October, more than the system can manage. The PSP did not respond to RTP in time for its report.

Where people are supposed to be held

The Ombudsman's anti-torture inspectorate, the Mecanismo Nacional de Prevenção (National Prevention Mechanism, MNP), sets out the network in its 2025 annual report. Portugal has a single Centro de Instalação Temporária (temporary installation centre, CIT), the Unidade Habitacional de Santo António in Porto, plus "equivalent spaces" (EECIT) in the international zones of Lisbon, Porto and Faro airports. The report says such detention should happen in dedicated places, separate from those used in criminal cases.

The inspectors found the system already stretched in 2025: for want of capacity, people were placed wherever there was room, not only according to the function of each centre, and that capacity had not changed during the year. At Santo António, where containers were added after a group of migrants landed on the Algarve coast in August 2025, eight people shared a 16 square metre container with no toilet inside: 2 square metres each, half the 4 square metre minimum the report cites.

Too few places, longer stays

In September, Superintendente-Chefe João Ribeiro, head of the PSP's Unidade Nacional de Estrangeiros e Fronteiras (National Foreigners and Borders Unit, UNEF), told Lusa that Portugal had 130 places and aimed for 306 in the second half of 2027 (we reported the interview). Two new centres planned with 30 million euros of recovery-plan money were dropped from the plan in November 2025, RTP reported in August.

RTP's report referred to a maximum stay of 60 days, but Article 146 of the Lei de Estrangeiros (Foreigners Act, Law 23/2007), as amended by Law 62/2026 of 10 September, now allows placement in a centre for up to 180 days, renewable once for the same period where the person does not cooperate or documents are delayed by another country. EU ministers have backed letting detention before removal run to two years, as we reported on 1 October.

What the law guarantees

Under the same act, a person detained for being in Portugal irregularly must be brought before a judge within 48 hours. Article 146-A gives anyone held in a centre or equivalent space the right to:

• contact their legal representatives, family and consular authorities, on request;
• speak to their lawyer in private;
• urgent health care and basic treatment of illness, with particular attention to vulnerable people such as children, pregnant women and victims of torture or serious violence.