Forty Immigrants Lodge AIMA Complaints Over Forged Residency Authorisations — Colombian Civil-Construction Workers Carry the Bulk of the 'Agenciador' Scheme

A group of 40 foreign workers, the majority of them Colombian nationals recruited into Portugal's civil-construction sector, filed formal complaints with the Agência para a Integração, Migrações e Asilo (AIMA) over forged residency authorisations supplied by intermediaries during their entry to the country. The cases were detailed in Público's PÚBLICO Brasil section on Wednesday.

The workers were recruited abroad by what the article terms "agenciadores" — labour brokers operating between Colombia and Portugal — who promised work in civil construction together with the residency permits the AIMA issues under Article 89 of the immigration law. On arrival the workers received documents that AIMA has since flagged as forgeries, leaving them without a valid título de residência, without the corresponding NISS social-security number, and exposed to dismissal if discovered during a labour inspection.

Where the scheme sits inside the wider immigration pipeline

The Internal Security Annual Report (RASI) for 2025 logged 22 confirmed Article 109 work-authorisation beneficiaries who were victims of document fraud during the year — 11 of them Colombian, with the remainder split across Guinea-Bissau, Angola, Brazil, Algeria, El Salvador, Ghana, and Sierra Leone. The 40 complaints filed this week are not yet inside that figure: they are pre-investigation administrative denunciations, sitting one step upstream of the criminal-investigation files that the Polícia Judiciária opens for human-trafficking cases.

The civil-construction sector accounts for the bulk of the active cases, which AIMA officials note is consistent with the wider pattern flagged in successive RASI reports: large infrastructure sites where subcontracting chains stretch four and five tiers deep tend to be the most permeable to forged documentation.

What AIMA can and cannot do

The agency has confirmed receipt of the 40 complaints but emphasised the legal limits of its remit. AIMA cannot confirm the existence of specific files under the data-protection regime, and it has no investigative authority over the criminal side of the scheme. The agency directs complainants to the PSP, the GNR, or the Polícia Judiciária for the criminal track, while running its own administrative procedure to issue replacement residency authorisations where the worker meets the underlying Article 88 or Article 89 criteria.

One worker quoted by Público summarised the recruitment moment as "ficamos um pouco desconfiados, mas acabámos por aceitar as propostas" — a sentence the article uses to mark the point at which the scheme converts suspicion into compliance, with the worker already abroad and dependent on the intermediary for accommodation, transport, and the promised contract.

The construction-sector context

The Associação dos Industriais da Construção Civil e Obras Públicas (AICCOPN) has previously estimated that foreign-born workers fill roughly 16% of the civil-construction headcount nationally, with the share above 25% in the Lisbon and Setúbal districts where the larger PRR-funded infrastructure projects are concentrated. The Inspecção-Geral do Trabalho has run targeted operations across the sector since 2023, but the upstream document-fraud layer — where the forgery enters the worker's file before any site visit — remains harder to detect.

AIMA has not yet announced a dedicated task force for the 40 cases, but the agency is the channel through which any replacement título de residência will eventually issue. The Conselho de Ministros' draft labour-code overhaul submitted to the Assembleia on 19 May does include a new criminal offence for labour brokers operating without the IEFP intermediation licence, which would close one of the legal gaps that allows the agenciador network to operate.