Hello, we had to fire IAS the lawyers that represent Mercan because they never filed a lawsuit for the renewal of our residency cards and lied about actually filing the lawsuit for more than a year, the deferimento tacito was filed incorrectly through IAS, they basically did nothing for us and lied. We fired them and got our money back for the lawsuit that was never filed, but we did not the time back for the time wasted. This after us asking for proof of filing the lawsuit over and over.
Now we have a new lawyer and she filed the deferimento tacito which was approved, etc. Now we can file a lawsuit. Question: anyone that had to file a lawsuit for their RENEWAL cards, how long did it take to get the cards? Our cards are almost a year expired, lawyer says some people even with the lawsuits are waiting a year. This means we could be without our residency cards for 2 plus years!!!
Sorry to hear about your experience with a dishonest firm. However, before proceeding with a lawsuit, have you considered the following steps?
Tracking the status of your renewal application online.
Sending a representative to the AIMA support center in Lisbon to inquire about the application in person.
Contacting DPAQ by email to confirm whether your application has been forwarded to them for processing.
A lawsuit can take anywhere from two to six months to reach a conclusion. Even after a favorable decision, AIMA may still take a considerable amount of time to process the application, which could further delay the outcome. It may therefore be worthwhile to exhaust these administrative avenues before pursuing legal action.
Hi Tommy, we have exhausted all the administrative avenues. I do not understand how Portugal can do this to people. It must give them joy to destroy peoples lives.
We just got our renewed residency cards in Oct. Our previous cards expired in Mar-2025, so effectively, we were on expired cards for 1.5y (fortunately, we didn’t have an urgent requirement to use them).
The online process is relatively (by their heavily discounted standards) efficient - my application was submitted/accepted in end March 2026 and our cards came through by early Oct. Even though the dependent applications were only accepted online end May , they got approved immediately after the main application was approved (i.e. did not follow chronological order) .
What type of visa are you on? D7 visas get renewed super fast. I did an on person renewal in Porto February 4th 2026 before the online system. Because the system was down my dependent was not able to apply until July2026. Cards expired (me) December 2025 (dependent) Feb 2026. We have tried everything. Sending the lawyer to AIMA, deferimento tacito which were approved, complaing to AIMA, yellow book, etc. Nothing is working applications just show as “pending”. I am so sick of this it is really exhausting.
well, we had to wait for a year from the expiry of first card. till we got our renewal appointments and then aima cancelled the appointment as they had moved to online -
our lawyers then applied on line and we got the cards in 6m post application- during that 6m period , the status showed as pending on the AIMA site -
If all this had happened minus the 12m gap from expiry to appointment /application, it wouldn’t be so bad