Trump White House still hasn’t fulfilled pledge to add Spanish to website

Washington — 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 Spanish-language 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.