STM Wraps Four-Day AIMA Walkout on Friday as Complaints Tracker Logs 37% Q1 Jump and the Backlog Storm Spills Into the Immigrant Pipeline

The Sindicato dos Técnicos de Migração (STM, Migration Officers' Union) closes its four-day walkout at the Agência para a Integração, Migrações e Asilo (AIMA, Agency for Integration, Migration and Asylum) on Friday 5 June 2026 — the final session of a paralisação (work stoppage) that ran on 1, 2, 3 and 5 June, with the Wednesday slotted into the broader CGTP greve geral (general strike) frame. The STM held attendance posts technically open through the four days to avoid further damaging immigrants whose appointments were already in the queue, but processing pace was visibly hit.

The union's pliego (formal grievance) lists four headline complaints: "crescente degradação das condições de trabalho" (escalating degradation of working conditions); the "aumento da pressão sobre os trabalhadores" (rising pressure on staff) absent a matching reinforcement of human and technical resources; the "incapacidade de resposta em tempo útil aos processos de regularização" (inability to process regularisation requests on time); and the persistent recurso ao outsourcing (resort to outsourcing) on technical functions that the STM argues should sit inside the regulated public-administration carreira. The union targets the Government of Luís Montenegro for what it calls unfulfilled promises around working conditions and a more humane immigration system.

The strike sat against the backdrop of a fresh data point on the user side of the AIMA front line. Portal da Queixa, the largest Portuguese consumer-complaints platform, reported that grievances filed against AIMA jumped 37% in the first quarter of 2026 versus the prior quarter and were already running at 740 entries by 27 May 2026 — well ahead of the 1,992 total recorded across the full year of 2025. The Q1 case load (643 complaints) ran 8.43% above the same window in 2025. The categorical breakdown skews toward administrative processes and documentation (41.4%), service quality and attendance failures (35.7%), and delays plus missed deadlines (6.1%), with digital-service issues, financial matters and legal-compliance complaints making up the tail.

The demographic profile of complainants tracks the active-immigrant population that AIMA processes day to day: 69% in the 25-44 age band, 51.6% women, 37.8% concentrated in the Lisbon district — the same geography that hosts the largest cluster of pending residence-permit renewals. AIMA's own service-quality readouts as captured by Portal da Queixa show a 14.7% response rate, a 15.4% resolution rate, and an 18.7% overall satisfaction index — well below the consumer-platform's cross-sector average and the floor that the agency's quality charter sets at 70% response inside fifteen working days.

On the operational reset side, AIMA has reported that of the 100,000 residence-permit renewal requests that entered the system since June 2025, roughly 90,000 have received a final decision and 87% of approved cases have received the physical título de residência. The agency also rolled out a digital certificate that immigrants with in-process applications can show as proof of regular status pending the physical card. The figures track the recovery trajectory but do not capture the new-arrival pipeline — visas, manifestações de interesse under the post-October 2024 frame, and CPLP (Comunidade dos Países de Língua Portuguesa, Community of Portuguese Language Countries) residence pathways — where the backlog has been the densest point of friction.

The next stress test sits inside the Decreto Regulamentar that adapts AIMA procedures to the new Lei de Estrangeiros (Foreigners' Law). The new rules tighten student-visa requirements, recalibrate the Comunicação de Residência (residence communication) for CPLP nationals and rewrite the family-reunification check. STM's pliego sits on top of a structural caseload expansion that the workers say cannot be absorbed at current head-count.