This “announced revolution” in the municipal care model has resulted in three of the main entities that managed key areas of the SAIER for decades being excluded from the service. The affected organizations are the Associació Benestar i Desenvolupament (ABD), responsible for initial attention; the Centre d'Informació per a Treballadors Estrangers (CITE), linked to CCOO and responsible for immigration procedures; and the Associació d'Ajuda Mútua d'Immigrants a Catalunya (AMIC), linked to UGT and focused on title homologation.
The change responds to the council's decision, taken in 2025, to replace traditional collaboration agreements with public tenders in most areas. The historical entities consider the economic conditions of the new tenders to be unfeasible, a fact that caused at least two of last year's tenders to be declared void.
The most critical situation occurred after December 31, when CITE ceased operations. This entity attended to approximately five hundred people every month. Throughout January, the SAIER could only handle urgent consultations, creating a gap that threatens to cause a backlog when the service normalizes. Since February, the entity FICAT has temporarily assumed urgent cases.
Municipal sources maintain that the problem arose because CITE rejected a service extension to cover the gap, while sources from the entity flatly deny that this option was ever offered to them.
This service crisis occurs at a particularly sensitive time due to the announced regularization of half a million immigrants by the Central Government. The Mayor of Barcelona, Jaume Collboni, announced that at least 24,000 people will be eligible for this measure in the Catalan capital, which has doubled the number of consultations received by immigration associations.
