When Portugal Abolished ‘ICE’

The year is 2020. In the beginning of spring, a media storm erupts over the shocking news of a Ukrainian citizen, Ihor Humenyuk, found dead at the Lisbon airport, while in the custody of the national border control agency SEF. Worse still, the death had apparently been concealed for hours due to fear over the disclosure of evidence of the victim’s mistreatment at the hands of SEF agents.

Portugal does not have a pristine reputation when it comes to the treatment of those under police custody. In the 1980s and ’90s, multiple instances of police abuse were reported by organisations like Amnesty International and some of the cases ended up with the ECHR. Police training was not as professional as it is today and many of the recruits came from poor backgrounds. The truth is that law enforcement salaries have never been a priority for the central government and to this day, many police facilities are squallid, policemen often having to contribute their own money for the uniforms and little risk insurance or trade union rights assured.

Unfortunately for Portugal, 2020 happens to coincide with the peak of the woke cultural revolution in the West and Lisbon has a socialist government headed by no other than …António Costa. Most politicians are opportunistic but Costa embodies this trait on steroids and for two basic reasons. Having become PM in 2015, Costa was forced to rule amid the consequences of the austerity crisis which his own party had created–having chosen to double the national public debt and subsequently bankrupting the country, during the subprime financial crisis of 2011, while ‘fighting the recession’–and thus, faced with the enormous burden of the debt servicing, the Socialist government has no money with which to distract or bribe the public. The other reason is ideological: as ‘The Third Way,’ Blairism had been discredited following the invasion of Iraq in 2003 and the financial crisis of 2007-2008. Costa himself is no eloquent charismatic dreamer but rather a grey Socialist Party (PS|S&D) apparatchik, unable to gloss over the dire situation of the country.

Following the infamous death of Ihor Humenyuk, the Costa government arbitrarily pays the family in Ukraine a compensation of €700,000, without any court decision on the case and thus also tainting the legal proceedings with a glaring public admission of guilt before the case has even been tried.

The Socialist government immediately suspends the work of SEF and spends months dismantling its infrastructure and competences. They replace the Serviço de Estrangeiros e Fronteiras (Foreigners and Border Service, SEF) with a stunted and perverted Agência para a Integração Migrações e Asilo (Agency for the Integration of Migrants and Asylum, AIMA). In other words, terms like ‘borders’ and ‘foreigners’ are substituted with ‘migration’, ‘integration’ and ‘asylum’; the goal is no longer to control or keep out illegal aliens but rather to assist in bringing them in. Border control is replaced by institutionalised infiltration.

And bring in the Socialists do: over the tenure of António Costa, roughly a million immigrants—a number that equals one tenth of the population–descend on Portugal in just about four years. The majority of those originate from third world countries, in no small part due to border controls being effectively removed. In fact, the new agency, AIMA, is deliberately inefficient and disorganised and, often enough, its functionaries see it as their mission to legalise as many claimants as possible. These one million people follow the almost half a million who had emigrated to Portugal in the previous decade, fleeing Venezuela’s socialism, Lula’s rule in Brazil, or escaping austerity, inflation, and Muslim immigration in Northern Europe. The difference is that some modicum of criteria and controls were exercised back when SEF was still in charge, whereas with AIMA, the flow became virtually unchecked. 

The immediate pressure of so many newcomers fuelled the ascent of the right-wing CHEGA! party (CH|PfE), which had been saying for years that the soaring of real estate prices and a progressive deterioration of the availability of national health service doctors and services was to blame on the radical policies of the extremist #RefugeesWelcome Costa government. For this stance, CH was denounced as populist, and accused of spreading fake news by the mainstream media aided by its the corporate establishment ‘fact-checkers.’ 

The truth? In 2025, a CNN journalist was forced to apologise to party leader André Ventura live on TV for having accused him of exaggeration regarding immigration figures. In the past month, the current social-democratic (PSD|EPP) government’s health minister admitted that the persistent scarcity of family doctors was due to demographic pressure emanating from immigration, and Portugal’s official statistics department (INE) now finds itself in hot water after it was forced to revise its demographic figures, showing that Portugal’s population amounts, in fact, to 11,4 million. This revision therefore puts Portugal in the EU’s Top 10 most populous states, in 9th place, and it also translates as fraud in what the Portuguese people and international institutions had been told by the Costa governments in terms of GDP growth. In reality, the overall GDP grew simply because more people had moved to Portugal and there was no actual growth of productivity or GDP per capita.

Additional side effects of the mass importing of immigrants are the reported ‘Portuguese’ criminals throughout Europe—criminals that qualify as Portuguese solely thanks to speedy AIMA legalisations, much as it has already been happening with Northern European nations and their passport holding criminals. Not to mention the growing number of public school classrooms where children with Portuguese names are a minority, a phenomenon exposed by CH and for which the corrupt mainstream media pounded the party, for daring to provide examples–thus “violating the privacy of children”…

The reader might be wondering, at this point, why António Costa chose to become the harbinger of woke totalitarianism and treason; after all, was he not a non-ideological grey apparatchik of PS?

Indeed, Costa started young in the PS youth league and became more well known in the years of PM António Guterres, the now UN Secretary-General, and in the ’90s, the Portuguese face of the ‘new Labour’ Blairite governance. Yet, early in the 2010s, Costa had a problem: as Mayor of Lisbon, he had been preparing to run for the leadership of the Socialist Party and then for PM, but the leadership of PS was then in the hands of the man who won this year’s presidential elections: António José Seguro. Seguro was a problem because he too hailed from the centrist wing of PS; so Costa was forced to ally with the woke extremist wing of the party in order to unseat Seguro and then run for PM himself. Upon seizing the premiership, António Costa had no other choice but to concede several ministries and MP seats to the deranged neo-Marxists of the party; these then enabled him to secure the parliamentary support of the communist and Trotskyite parties on the far-left.

This was the same trend observed in the U.S. with figures such as Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden—the faces of the ‘blue dog’ neoliberalism of the 1990s–now opening the door to the cultural Marxists and their anti-white, racist intersectionalism and third-worldist policies. For the professional political class, their racist pandering was performative; for the cultural Marxists, there was the additional convenience of not requiring concessions on labour laws, something the trade-unionists of the anti-globalisation movement had pushed for in the ’80s and ’90s–or, at least, no concessions beyond racist DEI hiring practices–, thus birthing the ‘mega corporate rainbow flag’ paradigm, exporting the cultural revolution to the world in a social-justice franchise. Rainbow-blessed dollars, after all, were still dollars. Nancy Pelosi kneeled for George Floyd with a face mask, while in Portugal, António Costa suddenly weaponised his Indian ancestry to accuse the opposition of racism. This bewildered not only most Portuguese people but even the members of his own party, most of whom had no idea he had Indian roots, as that fact had never been an issue in all the decades of his extremely successful political career–Portuguese people from southern part of the country, for example, can bear very dark complexions.

The problem currently observed in New York City with Zohran Mamdani and in the U.S. Democratic Party at large is that the neoliberal wokesters are losing ground to the actual Marxists they had allowed in over the past few decades. Tragically, after justifying third-worldism for years, the urban establishments are no longer capable of rhetorically defeating full-fledged Marxism. Much the same is taking place in Europe, where even Ursula von der Leyen attends ‘degrowth’ conferences, and EU bureaucrats are now rabid feminists and cultural Marxists, busy practising woke-inspired censorship.

Portugal was very much not the canary in the coal mine but stupidly, it chose to repeat the catastrophic mistakes other European nations had already bitterly regretted. Progressivism is not empirical.