Latinos have now surpassed African Americans as the nation’s largest minority group. Although Latinos have been in the country in significant numbers since the 1848 annexation of Northern Mexico, the Latino population has grown rapidly in recent decades as a result of immigration from Mexico and Central America, constituting 16.3% of the population in 2010. As their ranks have grown, Latinos in general and Mexicans in particular have been subjected to a variety of processes of racialization in public rhetoric and the media, and these have been associated with radical shifts in immigration and border policy, such that the U.S. immigration control system has become a major race-making institution for Latinos. This paper documents the progressive demonization of Latinos in the media, the rise of a harsh immigration enforcement regime, and the accompanying decline in the socioeconomic welfare of Latinos. In the end, the immigration enforcement system has come to affect Latinos in the same way that the criminal justice system affects blacks, further exacerbating intergroup inequalities and contributing to the growth of a new underclass in the United States.