Daily Times (Primos, PA)

Trump’s White House all but ignoring Spanish speakers

- By Jill Colvin and Luis Alonso Lugo The Associated Press

WASHINGTON » The Trump White House no habla español. Well, un poquito.

After a succession of administra­tions that embraced Spanishlan­guage content, President Donald Trump’s White House is all but ignoring Spanish speakers even though he has a robust online presence in English.

His administra­tion has yet to offer a Spanish White House website. It has eliminated the position of director of Hispanic media outreach. And its Spanish-language Twitter account is heavy with English text and features sloppy translatio­ns.

White House press secretary Sean Spicer said in January that the administra­tion had its “IT folks working overtime” to roll out a new Spanish language site after WhiteHouse. gov/espanol went dark in the hours after Trump took office.

“Trust me, it’s going to take a little bit more time, but we’re working piece by piece to get that done,” Spicer said at the time. More than five months later, the site still urges readers to “STAY TUNED.”

The White House’s Spanish twitter account, @LaCasaBlan­ca, is also far less active in the Trump era.

The account has tweeted just 41 times since Trump’s inaugurati­on; more than one-third of those posts came on the day of his address to a joint session of Congress on Feb. 28. Of the 41 tweets, about half were written in English. The Spanish tweets are sprinkled with typos — 11 in all. While most mistakes are minor flubs such as missing accents, those accents often change the meaning of words significan­tly. For instance, they turn “medical” into “medicate” or “is” into “this.”

Notably, one of the first agencies to expand Spanish-language content during the Trump era has been U.S. Immigratio­n and Customs Enforcemen­t. The agency better known as ICE is responsibl­e for carrying out deportatio­ns. Last month, it announced that it was expanding the Spanish section of its website and started a new Spanish twitter feed, @ICEespanol.

The White House director of media affairs, Helen Aguirre Ferre, said she expects a Spanish website to launch later this year. She noted the Obama administra­tion took nine months to launch its version, adding that “the priority remains to improve the English language website.”

She said there was no plan to hire a press officer solely dedicated to Spanish-language media at this time. She said she and another staffer in the communicat­ions operation are bilingual and conduct interviews in Spanish. Spanish-language media are also invited to participat­e in press briefings, background briefings and other events.

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