(John Leguizamo) rips Univision's "Caca" (Trump) interview.

The column by Ramos, an influential anchor of Univision News since 1986, goes to 40 U.S. and Latin American newspapers, and he speaks on Univision Radio and other television shows. His most recent column, headlined “The Danger of Not Confronting Trump,” addressed the recent interview and recounted the ex-president’s separation of immigrant families and lies, including that he won the 2020 election.Latino backlash grows over Donald Trump’s friendly Univision interview

“We cannot normalize behavior that threatens democracy and the Hispanic community, or offer Trump an open microphone to broadcast his falsehoods and conspiracy theories. We must question and fact-check everything he says,” Ramos wrote. Ramos has tangled with Trump before and was ejected from a news conference in 2015 after asking the candidate about his remarks denigrating immigrants.

Ramos’s comments are the latest fallout from the interview that was recorded on Nov. 7 at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago Club, in which a Mexico-based journalist conducting the interview did not challenge false statements by Trump, including assertions that he had built a wall on the border and that Mexico had effectively paid for it. The interview, which had many softball questions and was broadcast on Nov. 9, led to much criticism of Univision and its new owners. One prominent anchor, León Krauze, resigned in its aftermath.

Ramos didn’t say whether he would follow Krauze out the door but left open the possibility, writing that “for 39 years Univision has allowed me to report with absolute independence and freedom — and even to write columns like this one.” He added, “I will continue to do it as a free journalist, wherever I might be.”

The Trump broadcast was part of a broader shift in tone since Mexican media company Grupo Televisa, which works closely with Mexican political leaders, merged with Univision in 2021. Univision’s Miami station enthusiastically covered a Trump rally on Nov. 8 in Hialeah, Fla., that it described as “historic,” preempting a national show, and it canceled a planned Democratic response to the Trump interview, The Washington Post has reported.

Trump praised the new owners, saying they were “unbelievable entrepreneurial people, and they like me.”

The coverage has alarmed Latino advocacy groups and Democrats, especially because Trump has been polling better among minority groups than during his previous runs. Hispanics are a large proportion of the electorate in Florida, Texas and California and a significant proportion in more closely contested states.

Former Univision president Joaquin Blaya called the Trump interview “a repudiation of the concept of separation of business and news,” and those still inside the newsroom have privately echoed the sentiment, complaining that it is a disservice to viewers and listeners.

In previous Trump campaigns, Univision and Ramos in particular have asked tough questions of Trump, who launched his 2016 campaign by calling Mexican immigrants drug dealers, criminals and rapists. Trump himself is now facing 91 criminal counts in four courts, as Ramos noted in his column.

Spokespeople at TelevisaUnivision did not respond to Post emails seeking comment about Ramos’s column.

"What you want to do in an interview or in a press conference is to unmask, if possible, the person you are talking to," Ramos says. "When Donald Trump decided to throw me out, I think he was unmasked. That's the real Donald Trump."

At the Iowa press event on Tuesday, Ramos stood up and tried to ask Trump about the candidate's controversial immigration proposals. Trump told him to "sit down" because he hadn't been called on.

"Go back to Univision," Trump said.

Ramos refused to sit down. Security personnel escorted him out of the room -- something that Ramos said he "never expected."

"I knew it was going to be tough," Ramos said in an interview with me for CNN's "Reliable Sources." "I knew... he wasn't going to like it. But I never expected that instead of answering my questions, he was going to call his security detail to throw me out."

Trump implied that the security personnel acted on their own, something that Ramos refutes.

Ramos was allowed back into the press conference about ten minutes later -- partly because other journalists in the room asked Trump if they'd let him back in -- and had a lengthy back and forth with the candidate.

Ramos said he had personally thanked two other questioners, Kasie Hunt of MSNBC and Tom Llamas of ABC, for challenging Trump about his removal from the room.

He also said Trump's initial refusal to engage with him revealed something important about the Republican frontrunner.

"He tried to stop me when he realized that he didn't like the question," Ramos said.

The anchorman's detractors say he should have waited to be called on. But he said he doesn't believe that Trump ever would have.

Ramos, the best-known Spanish-language news anchor in the United States, said he'd been spurned in his numerous attempts to interview Trump.

"I sent a handwritten note to Mr. Trump" requesting an interview "and instead of responding to me, he published it online with my cell phone" number, Ramos pointed out.

So he and his colleagues started planning a press conference visit weeks before the Iowa confrontation. Tuesday ended up being relatively convenient, although he did miss his weekly program on Fusion, an English-language cable channel co-owned by Univision.

Ramos said of his ejection from the press conference, "this is the kind of thing that you see in dictatorships, but not in the United States of America."

So I asked him -- you don't really think that if Trump becomes president, that people will be kicked out of the White House Briefing Room, do you?

"Well, we don't know," he answered. "That's exactly what he did to me. And he acted in an incredibly authoritarian way. That's exactly what he did. And that's dangerous for press freedom in the United States."

Ramos said Trump's campaign -- dismissed by some as a sideshow -- should be taken seriously, "because the things that he is saying," like a plan for mass deportations, would have severe consequences for the country, including for the Hispanic Americans who make up the bulk of his television audience.

"If you don't challenge authority, if you don't challenge power, then what's -- what's the reason behind being a reporter?" he asked.

Trump said on CNN's "New Day" that Ramos was "screaming like a madman" at the press conference, acting rude, loud and "obnoxious."

Ramos' response is that "I'm just a reporter."

But there's no doubt he also sometimes sounds like an advocate.

He says, "When human rights are involved, when immigration rights are involved, when discrimination and racism is involved, we, as reporters, have to take a stand."

Ramos said Trump's ongoing lawsuit against Univision -- relating to the network's cancellation of his Miss USA pageant telecast in July -- is a "legal issue" that doesn't affect him one bit.

Oh, and by the way, he still wants a proper interview with Trump.

The former president of Univision condemned its recent interview with Donald Trump, telling MSNBC's Rachel Maddow that it was "a real insult to the Hispanic community" that "deviates in a very drastic way" from the Spanish-language network's original mission.

Joaquin Blaya not only criticized the interview itself, which he dismissed as "a one-hour propaganda open space," meaning, an interview created with total cooperation between the journalist and the subject. He also laid blame squarely on Univision's owners, telling Maddow "there is no doubt that in doing what they did, had to be a corporate decision."

Blaya, who created Univision news in the late 1980s, told Maddow the interview "is a drastic change for what have been the standards of Univision. When I created the Univision network news, they were built on the principles of American broadcasting journalism, the ABC, CBS, NBC… we were trying to basically create a Spanish but American network. And I say that because there's a big difference from our association in those days with the news that we're coming from Mexico."

Blaya noted that the standard was to bring "excellence in journalism" to the Hispanic community, "and this basically deviates in a very drastic way from what has been that."

He later added that "to call the Trump an interview is mistaken. It was not an interview, as we understand in the United States. That was basically a one-hour propaganda open space for former President Trump to say whatever he wanted to say."

Then noting the softball nature of the interview, and the way Univision favorably covered Trump's anti-immigrant views, Blaya added that the interview was "a real insult to the Hispanic community of this country."

"And for those who understand the business, there is no doubt that in doing what they did, had to be a corporate decision," Blaya said also. "That is not a decision that the local news director or the local general manager would have taken on its own."

The interview, which aired Nov. 9 on Univision was derided at the time for the extremely friendly treatment it have trump. But in the weeks since revelations about the network's unusual and arguably unethical behavior have raised even bigger questions.

For instance, it canceled ads purchased by the Biden administration, citing a never-before-announced policy against running opposition ads during interviews with only a single candidate. This ensured only Trump-friendly content aired during the program. Univision also canceled a planned interview with a Biden official to respond to Trump.

One of the network's top anchors resigned over the matter, and now the company's new owners — who took over when Mexico's conservative pro-Government Grupo Televisa merged with Univision last year — are under greater scrutiny.