The director general of the Migration Agency, Vice Admiral Luis Rafael Lee Ballester sent a formal clarification to Listin Diario with corrected information on residency permits issued in May 2024. Listin Diario had reported, citing data from the Migration website, that May 2024, an electoral month, was showing a abnormal spike in number of residencies granted.
Lee Ballester attributed the abnormally high number of residencies to a corrupted data file.
In a letter addressed to the newspaper’s director, Miguel Franjul, Lee Ballester explained that a report titled “May 2024: Migration Granted More Residencies Than in an Entire Year” relied on inaccurate information. The error originated from a compromised file uploaded to the government’s Open Data portal in June 2024.
The Migration Agency became aware of the error following the publication in Listin Diario.
As reported by the DGM, following an exhaustive internal audit of the agency’s database, the verified figures for the year 2024 were sent to the newspaper to set the record straight.
The residences issued in May 2024 were 6,173 and not 122,560 as earlier indicated. Likewise, the Total Annual Residences for 2024 were 63,890 and not 138,000 as reported. The vast majority of these (56,780) were renewals for foreigners already legally residing in the country. Only 7,110 were new issuances.
The director general emphasized that the corrected data refutes any claims of extraordinary or massive residency grants. He noted that the bulk of the agency’s workload involves maintaining the legal status of foreigners who are already part of the system, rather than admitting new residents.
“The new issuances represented a significantly smaller proportion of the total,” Lee Ballester stated, “which rules out any interpretation suggesting a massive or extraordinary granting of residencies during that period.”
The Migration Agency (DGM) confirmed that the Open Data portal has been updated with the corrected statistics to prevent further public misinformation.
Read more:
Listin Diario
DR1 News
15 January 2026