<h6><strong>Eduardo González</strong></h6> <h4><strong>The Congress Foreign Affairs Committee has urged the government to discuss with the United States administration to restore the use of the Spanish language in "official White House media," following President Donald Trump's decision to shut down the Spanish-language page of the US presidential website.</strong></h4> Last January, shortly after taking office, Trump ordered the closure of the Spanish-language page of the White House website. Following this decision, King Felipe VI took advantage of his speech during the meeting of the Board of Trustees of the Cervantes Institute to describe Trump's measure as "striking." The director of the Institute, Luis García Montero, denounced the US president's "arrogance," which has reduced Spanish to "a language of the poor and migrants." He also announced that the Cervantes Institute and the Royal Spanish Academy (RAE) are considering the possibility of holding the next International Congress on the Language in the United States. According to data from the Cervantes Institute, the United States has approximately 60 million Spanish speakers, making it the second largest Spanish-speaking country in the world, behind only Mexico. Furthermore, forecasts indicate that 27.5% of the US population will be of Hispanic origin in the coming years. In a non-legislative motion presented by the Popular Party (PP) Parliamentary Group and approved on May 6, as per its terms, by the Congressional Foreign Affairs Committee, the House of Representatives urges the government to "support the Academies' statement condemning the elimination of Spanish from official White House media" and to "apply to the United States government to restore its use in official administration channels." Likewise, the motion (published this week in the Official Gazette of Congress) calls for promoting the presence of Spanish in Washington, DC, through the Cervantes Institute; for the development of specific programming in the United States that highlights the historical ties of the Spanish language and the country's origins; and for a report to be submitted to Congress within six months on the status of the Spanish language in the United States and on the activities planned by the various state-funded institutions and chairs, as well as their expected impact. <h5><strong>Amendments</strong></h5> Sumar, the minority party in the coalition government, went further and unsuccessfully attempted to introduce a paragraph urging the executive branch to "report to the Trump administration the elimination of Spanish as a language of communication with the White House and demand that this administration address the prospects for changing that decision." For its part, the far-right Vox party, which has openly supported Donald Trump from the outset, introduced an amendment completely removing the paragraph urging the government to "support the Academies' manifesto condemning the elimination of Spanish from official White House media and to address the United States government to restore its use in official administration channels" and attempting to replace it with another text in favor of "working with the United States government to restore Spanish in official channels, recognizing the work of the academies in their defense of Spanish in White House media." It also added a fifth point, unrelated to the purpose of the non-legislative proposal, to "promote the appropriate legal modifications to proceed with the immediate closure of the so-called 'Catalan embassies' abroad."
