The White House still doesn’t offer a Spanish-language version of its website more than a year after President Trump took office, The Associated Press reports.
The past two administrations offered Spanish content on the official White House website. Then-press secretary Sean Spicer said last year that Trump officials had deleted the Spanish parts of the site but the staffers were “working overtime” to create a new one.
White House director of media affairs Helen Aguirre Ferre said in July that the Spanish site would be launched by the end of 2017, but has now declined to tell the AP if the website is still in the works.
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“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.
Nearly one in five people in the U.S. speak Spanish, and Latinos make up the largest minority group in the country.
Hispanic advocates slammed the lack of Spanish-language content on the site, with Javier Palomarez, the president and CEO of the US Hispanic Chamber of Commerce, telling the AP that it “sends a very troubling message.”
The White House does maintain a Spanish-language Twitter account, but it rarely posts tweets, while other agencies include Spanish content on their specific websites.
Trump has spoken out against certain Hispanic immigrants since the early days of his campaign, and has pushed for a crackdown on illegal immigration and a wall on the U.S.-Mexico border.
The lack of a Spanish website puts the U.S. behind other major countries, most of which offer Spanish content. China, Russia and North Korea all offer information in Spanish, the AP noted.