Texarkana Gazette

Still no Spanish website for White House

- By Luis Alonso Lugo AP Bureau Chief Eric Talmadge in Pyongyang, North Korea, contribute­d to this report.

WASHINGTON—Nada de nada—nothing at all.

A year into the Trump administra­tion, the White House website still has no Spanish-language content, unlike during the two previous administra­tions and even though nearly 1 in 5 people in the United States speaks Spanish.

Even Iran and reclusive North Korea have made efforts to reach out to the Spanish-speaking world. In the U.S., meanwhile, President Donald Trump’s anti-immigrant rhetoric and his plan to build a wall on the border with Mexico are alienating some Hispanics.

A year ago, then-presidenti­al press secretary Sean Spicer said the new administra­tion had deleted Spanish content on the White House webpage but its informatio­n technology folks were “working overtime” to develop a new site. In July, the White House director of media affairs, Helen Aguirre Ferre, said she expected a Spanish website to launch at the end of 2017.

Now, Aguirre Ferre declines to say whether there are still plans to have a Spanishlan­guage website.

“We continue to work on improving the White House website providing important content in English pertaining to the initiative­s and policies the Trump administra­tion is undertakin­g,” she said in an email.

Javier Palomarez, president and CEO of the U.S. Hispanic Chamber of Commerce, said the absence of a White House webpage in Spanish “sends a very troubling message.”

“There are over 4 million Hispanic-American entreprene­urs and businesspe­ople in this country, many of whom are receptive to the administra­tion’s pro-business agenda,” Palomarez wrote in an email. “If they made even a little effort to communicat­e and engage with the Latino community, perhaps they would win a few of them over.”

As Latinos became the largest minority in the U.S., President George W. Bush’s administra­tion added Spanish-language content to the White House website for the first time.

Luis Miranda, director of Hispanic media at the White House under President Barack Obama, said the Spanish-language site during Obama’s tenure included informatio­n geared to Latinos on topics such as immigratio­n, health issues, banking and veterans affairs.

During his presidenti­al campaign, Trump criticized GOP rival Jeb Bush for answering a reporter’s question in Spanish, saying the former Florida governor “should really set the example by speaking English while in the United States.” Trump also turned off many Hispanic voters with his harsh anti-immigratio­n rhetoric, referring to many Mexican immigrants as “criminals” and “rapists.”

The Trump White House does keep a Spanish Twitter account, LaCasa Blanca, but it is not very active. Created the same month, January 2017, as its English equivalent, White House, it has about 200 tweets compared with almost 3,200 on the English version.

The U.S. does provide news in Spanish and 40 other languages through the government-news outlet Voice of America. Also, the official guide to government informatio­n and services runs gobierno.usa.gov, and other agencies—including the Internal Revenue Service and the Department of Homeland Security—offer informatio­n in Spanish in their websites.

The current White House website offers a clear contrast with efforts of other countries to communicat­e with Spanish speakers, who number at least 572 million worldwide, according to The Instituto Cervantes, created by the government of Spain.

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