On a dark highway outside of Houston, just after midnight, on Independence Day 1987, a police officer notices a white Toyota that seems to be lost in weaving.

Suspecting a drunk driver, he flips on his overhead lights and sirens and pulls them over. He gets out of his car with a flashlight in hand. But he'd need more than that.

They had kidnapped a guy and he was in the trunk of the car. The guys started banging on the trunk.

That's retired Houston police officer Jaime Escalante. And according to him, the guy in the trunk wasn't their only contraband.

The three men in the white Toyota were also in possession of $750,000 worth of cocaine. They weren't about to go down at a traffic stop.

As the officer gets out of his car, one of the men gets out of the Toyota and begins talking to him. Suddenly, another door on the Toyota flies open and one of the other men gets out and begins firing at the officer.

After opening fire, the men jump back in the car and drive away from where the officer fell to the pavement.

In the rear-view mirror, the beam of his flashlight is the only indication that something's wrong.

I'm Cristele Alonso. I'm a comedian and activist. And this is a piece of history I can almost guarantee you've never heard before.

The story of a young band of Latino police officers thrust into an impossible, unwinnable situation by a police department with their back against the wall.

With little training and even fewer resources, they were assigned to solve the city's toughest crimes.

From Frequency Machine and the Vox Media Podcast Network, this is Chicano Squad.

I'm in between. I'm swimming upstream.

Jaime Escalante was born to be a police officer. And he found his calling as soon as he entered the Academy in 1981.

He had a couple of near-brushes with death in a car accident and a shooting. They left him with the so-called Superman Complex.

It's something that affects so many officers where they imagine themselves to be invincible.

Jaime paid attention to everything. He had noticed immediately in the mid-1980s when Spanish-speaking immigrants began arriving in Houston from Colombia and started dealing drugs on the corners of the 5th Ward.

He'd gotten to know them. He'd spoken to a lot of them over the years. He'd even watched some of them ascend the cartel hierarchies.

They were a vindictive jealous type. But as they got to know Jaime Escalante, they began to trust him. They regularly fed him tips.

And sure, they were criminals. But when they were killed, they left behind families too. Families who wanted answers.

I remember somebody saying, well, it's just to eliminate another drug dealer who cares just Galante. But I never looked at it like that.

I was like, even though they destroyed a lot of families and stuff, but still, the only God can take your life away, man.

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