Jorge Gilberto Ramos Avalos grew up in Mexico City and arrived in the United States in 1983, at age 24, after his career as a journalist for Mexico’s Televisa network came to an abrupt end. Ramos had reported a story about Mexican psychology that doubled as a critique of Mexico’s authoritarian government, which at the time had been controlled exclusively by the center-right Institutional Revolutionary Party for more than half a century. (Its rule would last another 17 years, a streak that once provoked the Nobel laureate Mario Vargas Llosa to call Mexico the “perfect dictatorship.”) Ramos’s footage included interviews he did with the well-known dissident intellectuals Carlos Monsiváis and Elena Poniatowska. When Televisa tried bowdlerizing the footage with a pro-government spin, he destroyed the tape and resigned, effectively blacklisting himself. Less than a year later, he sold his Volkswagen Beetle and moved to Los Angeles in hopes of restarting his career in the United States. In January 1984, he began working for a Los Angeles station, KMEX, affiliated with a Spanish-language network that would, a few years later, be rebranded as Univision.

Ramos’s English was still so wobbly that he felt nervous about asking questions at press conferences, but his timing was impeccable. Two years earlier, Univision made its first national newscast out of its Miami affiliate, WLTV. Just months after Ramos moved to WLTV to host a morning show called “Mundo Latino,” the staff of the national newscast resigned en masse to protest the hiring of a famous Mexican news anchor named Jacobo Zabludovsky who was known for his close ties to the Mexican government. Ultimately, Zabludovsky went back to Mexico for “personal reasons,” leaving the network in urgent need of an evening news anchor. Ramos got the job. He was just 28 years old.

Ramos’s professional ascent also coincided with the rise of Latinos as the most demographically significant minority group in the United States. According to the Pew Research Center, in 1980 there were 14.7 million Latinos in the United States. By 2013, that figure had more than tripled to 53.9 million. In 2010, Latinos passed African-Americans as the country’s single largest minority. When he began working at KMEX, Ramos recalls in his memoir, “No Borders,” the political power of Latinos “was almost nonexistent.” By 2012, however, the Latino vote had become crucial to winning presidential elections, and Univision’s influence rose with the demographic tide. When the network requested that a fourth presidential debate be held and carried exclusively on its network, in Spanish, Republican nominee Mitt Romney and President Barack Obama quickly agreed to a compromise: two town-hall-style “forums” aired in September, a month before their English-language debates.

As the 2016 election approaches, Univision’s parent company, Univision Communications, wants to expand its power beyond the Spanish-language market. It has already announced that Univision will hold a Republican candidates forum with The Washington Post sometime before March. But the main instrument of its ambitions is the company’s fledgling English-language cable network and online-media startup, Fusion. A joint venture between Univision Communications and Disney/ABC that started in October 2013 — with Univision handling content and ABC handling distribution — Fusion hopes to attract a millennial audience. The network’s lead news program is “America With Jorge Ramos.” Ramos is so important to the strategy that for months after Fusion’s start, he appeared every night on both “Noticiero Univisión” (in Spanish) and “America With Jorge Ramos” (in English), as well as on Sunday’s “Al Punto” (in Spanish). He averaged 35 interviews a week in all. Since then, “America With Jorge Ramos” has scaled back to Tuesday nights, but Ramos told me that they are prepared to do more as Election Day nears.

Fusion’s fate may be contingent on the network (and Ramos) being a real actor in 2016. This July, in preparation for its upcoming initial public offering, Univision Communications revealed that Fusion posted a net loss of $35 million in 2014. It has no distribution on Comcast or Time Warner Cable, which means it wasn’t available in the Phoenix hotel in which Ramos spent the night before his interview with Arpaio. Fusion makes and airs documentaries — a strategy it plans to intensify in the coming months — but right now as a news organization, it is essentially an online start-up focused on social media and making headlines.

Dax Tejera, the executive producer of “America With Jorge Ramos,” says that profit is not Fusion’s top priority. “I’ve gone into meetings where my bosses have said, ‘We want Fusion and the brand to be ubiquitous with the election,’” Tejera told me at a food court in the Houston airport, as he and Ramos traveled from Phoenix back to Miami. “They’re not saying to me, ‘We want to hit this target with the ratings, this target with the revenue stream,’ which is the traditional speak in an established media organization. Ours is about awareness and brand identity and association.” The idea, he said, tapping his upper arm, was for Fusion’s fans to want to wear their viewership on their sleeve as “a badge brand.”

Tejera pointed to Ramos’s April interview with the Florida senator and Republican presidential candidate Marco Rubio as one of the best examples of how they are trying to drive the political conversation. Before the interview, they convened in Ramos’s office to figure out the most visceral question they could ask about gay rights. They went with: “If someone in your family or your office happens to be gay and they invite you to their wedding, would you go?”