A Lisbon court has given AIMA seven days to act on the teenager it left waiting two years
Kauê Matos, 19, was stopped at Lisbon airport without a valid residence permit and flown to Brazil. His family reunification file had been sitting undecided at AIMA since 2024.
Kauê Matos is 19. He had been living in Portugal for about two years with his parents and brother, and he was on his way back from a school placement in Ireland when border officers at Lisbon’s Humberto Delgado airport stopped him. He had no valid residence permit, because the family reunification application his family filed with AIMA was still, two years later, undecided. Days later he was on a flight to Brazil.
On Friday the case turned. The Lisbon Circuit Administrative Court accepted the injunction his lawyers had filed and gave AIMA seven days to schedule the submission of his residence application. Seven days is a tight leash for an agency whose delays are measured in years, and that is rather the point. The court is saying that administrative slowness cannot be treated as a fact of nature.
Lawful on paper, uncomfortable in practice
Formally, none of this broke any rule. Without a valid permit, a foreign national in Portugal is irregular, and removal is one of the outcomes the law provides for. What makes the case sit badly is the order of events: the irregularity grew out of the state’s own silence, not out of anything the family chose.
The revised foreigners law stretched AIMA’s decision deadline from 90 days to as much as 270, with extensions possible in exceptional cases, and tightened the conditions for family reunification. Anyone already queuing before that change simply kept accumulating months inside a system that, on the latest official counts, still has tens of thousands of files open. We keep the running picture in our AIMA tracker.
What happens next
His lawyers are waiting on the outcome of the administrative actions before choosing a route. Two options are live: applying for a student visa at the Portuguese consulate in Brazil, or flying back as soon as AIMA sets a date to formalise the residence application. The second one rests entirely on the agency honouring those seven days.
If you are anywhere near this situation, the practical lesson is thankless but worth having. The proof of submission is the document that counts at a border, and travelling outside the Schengen area with a pending file and an expired permit is the riskiest moment in the whole process. Deadlines and official channels are published on the AIMA portal.
Photo: GualdimG / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)
