As a news anchor, Ramos serves as both a reporter and an advocate. “My only weapon is the question,” he says. Photograph by Philip Montgomery for The New Yorker

When Jorge Ramos travels in Middle America, nobody recognizes him—until somebody does. Ramos is the evening-news co-anchor on Univision, the country’s largest Spanish-language TV network, a job he has held since 1986. A few weeks ago, I was on a flight with him from Chicago to Dubuque. Ramos, who is fifty-seven, is slim, not tall, with white hair and an unassuming demeanor. Wearing jeans, a gray sports coat, and a blue open-collared shirt, he went unremarked. But then, as he disembarked, a fellow-passenger, a stranger in her thirties, drew him aside at the terminal gate, speaking rapidly in Spanish. Ramos bowed his head to listen. The woman was a teacher at a local technical college. Things in this part of Iowa were bad, she said. People were afraid to leave their houses. When they went to Walmart, they only felt comfortable going at night. Ramos nodded. Her voice was urgent. She wiped her eyes. He held her arm while she composed herself. The woman thanked him and rushed away.

“Did you hear that?” he asked, at the car-rental counter. “They only go out to Walmart at night.”

In an Italian restaurant on a sleepy corner in downtown Dubuque, a dishwasher came out from the kitchen toward the end of lunch to pay her respects. She, too, fought back tears as she thanked Ramos for his work. He asked her how long she had been in Iowa. Five years, she said. She was from Hidalgo, not far from Mexico City, Ramos’s home town. She hurried back to the kitchen.

“We have almost no political representation,” Ramos said. He meant Latinos in the United States. “Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz won’t defend the undocumented.”

“A Country for All,” Ramos’s most recent book—he has published eleven—is dedicated to “all undocumented immigrants.” He was trying to explain how a journalist finds himself in the role of advocate.

“We’re a young community,” he said. “You wouldn’t expect ABC, or any of the mainstream networks, to take a position on immigration, health care, anything. But at Univision it’s different. We are pro-immigrant. That’s our audience, and people depend on us. When we are better represented politically, that role for us will recede.”

Besides co-anchoring the nightly news, and cranking out books, Ramos hosts a Sunday-morning public-affairs show, “Al Punto” (“To the Point”), and writes a syndicated column; for the past two years, he has also hosted a weekly news-magazine show, “America with Jorge Ramos,” in English, on a fledgling network (a joint venture of Univision and ABC) called Fusion. (When Jon Stewart asked him, on “The Daily Show,” to account for his hyperactivity, Ramos said, “I’m an immigrant. So I just need to get a lot of jobs.”) His English is fluent, if strongly accented. His Spanish, particularly on-air, is carefully neutral—pan-Latino, not noticeably Mexican. Univision’s audience comes from many different countries, and the network broadcasts from Miami, where the most common form of Spanish is Cuban.

Ramos occupies a peculiar place in the American news media. He has won eight Emmys and an armload of journalism awards, covered every major story since the fall of the Berlin Wall, and interviewed every American President since George H. W. Bush. (He’s interviewed Barack Obama half a dozen times.) But his affiliation can work against him. In June, when he sent a handwritten letter to Donald Trump, who had just launched his Presidential campaign, requesting an interview, it was no dice. Univision had cut its business ties with Trump, including its telecasts of the Miss U.S.A. and Miss Universe beauty pageants, after Trump accused Mexico of sending “rapists” to the United States. Trump posted Ramos’s letter on Instagram, crowing that Univision was “begging” him for interviews. The letter included Ramos’s personal cell-phone number, which Ramos was then obliged to change. In the weeks that followed, Trump produced a stream of provocative remarks and proposals about Mexicans and immigration, giving the national immigration-policy debate the hardest edge it has had in generations. Now Ramos really wanted to interview him.

Trump was planning a rally on Dubuque’s riverfront that afternoon. Ramos and Dax Tejera, a young Fusion executive producer, met up with a local cameraman in the parking lot of the Grand River Center, where a press conference was scheduled in advance of the rally. They went inside early, past some tables where Ann Coulter, who was going to introduce Trump at the rally, was setting up to sign copies of her latest book, “¡Adios, America!: The Left’s Plan to Turn Our Country Into a Third World Hellhole.” Ramos, heading upstairs, said, “We had her on our show when that book came out. Trump seems to be getting his ideas from her.”

In the room designated for the press conference, Ramos and Tejera considered camera angles and lighting. They staked out a pair of front-row seats. Ramos was studying a sheaf of notes. “Normally, I’d just have a ten-second question prepared,” he said. “But this is not normal. Here I have to make a statement, as an indignant immigrant. Tell him that Latinos despise him. And then I have to ask a question, as a journalist, if he’ll let me.” The room was filling with reporters. Ramos worried that Trump would recognize him and not call on him. “It will be important to stand up,” he said. “Trump’s street-smart. If you’re sitting, he’ll use it, the visual power imbalance, and squash you.” Tejera stationed the cameraman against a wall. “TV is not reality,” Ramos said, miming a frame with his hands. “It’s a way of exaggerating a moment. Reality is what we’re living here. What we’re after is something else.”

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Trump arrived, with a phalanx of aides. He walked to a waist-high lectern decorated with a Trump poster and said, “Hello, everybody, how are you? Carl?”

Carl Cameron, of Fox News, asked about a local campaign operative who was leaving Rick Perry’s campaign for Trump’s. The operative joined Trump at the lectern for a couple of questions. Then, as Trump stepped back to the microphone alone, Ramos stood up. “Mr. Trump, I have a question about immigration,” he said. Trump ignored him, scanning the room as if no one had spoken, saying, “O.K., who’s next?” He pointed at someone. “Yeah. Please.”

Ramos persisted. “Mr. Trump, I have a question.”

Trump turned and said, “Excuse me. Sit down. You weren’t called. Sit down. Sit down.”

Ramos remained standing.

“Sit down.” The sneer in Trump’s tone was startling.

“No, Mr. Trump,” Ramos said, his voice level. “I’m a reporter, an immigrant, a U.S. citizen. I have the right to ask a question.”

“No, you don’t,” Trump said, sharply. “You haven’t been called. Go back to Univision.”

Ramos: “Mr. Trump, you cannot deport eleven million people. You cannot build a nineteen-hundred-mile wall.”

Trump began scanning the room again. Reporters were raising their hands. Trump pointed at one.

“You cannot deny citizenship to children in this country,” Ramos continued.

Trump turned to his left and seemed to give a signal, a kind of duck-lipped kissing or sucking expression. A bodyguard with a buzz cut started to cross the stage. “Go ahead,” Trump muttered to him.

The bodyguard went for Ramos, who was still talking. “Those ideas—” The bodyguard, who was a foot taller than Ramos, began to push him backward, out of the room. “I’m a reporter,” Ramos said. “Don’t touch me, sir.” His voice did not rise. “You cannot touch me.” The bodyguard had him by the left arm and was now moving him swiftly toward an exit door.