Donald Trump's administration takes down Spanish-language White House website

Sean Spicer promises separate site will return shortly

(Getty Images)

The Donald Trump administration has taken down the Spanish-language version of the White House website.

The last two presidents, George W Bush and Barack Obama, had maintained separate sites for Spanish-speakers but on Tuesday whitehouse.gov/espanol returned a 404 error and a message that said: "Sorry, the page you're looking for can't be found".

It comes after White House pages on civil rights history, climate change and LGBT issues were also removed.

White House press secretary Sean Spicer said the Spanish site would return. He said: "We hit the ground running on day one. There was a lot of work to do, and we had done a lot of work on the website to make sure that we were prepared to get as much information up as fast as possible.

"We are continuing to build out the website both in the issue areas and in that area. But we’ve got the IT folks working overtime to continue to get all of that up to speed. Trust me, it’s going to take a little bit more time, but we’re working piece by piece to get that done."

At a presidential debate in California in 2015 Mr Trump told Jeb Bush, whose wife was born in Mexico, that "this is a country where we speak English, not Spanish".

In fact, the US is the world's second-largest Spanish-speaking country after Mexico — even ahead of Spain, with 41 million native Spanish speakers, plus another 11.6 million who are bilingual.

Much of the US is territory gained from Mexico in the mid-19th century.