SAN YSIDRO – Border Patrol agent Duane Cody presses against the only slice of single fence legally accessible in the San Diego border’s massive two-fence system and assures three women on Mexican soil that for four hours every Saturday this is a special safe zone for everyone, including illegal immigrants meeting with relatives from south of the border.

Speaking in Spanish through the thick steel grate with open squares barely big enough to slip a pen through, the women again ask if he is absolutely sure there will be no arrests on the U.S. side in this area called Friendship Circle. Cody, who has relatives in Mexico, smiles and promises that once a week the spot isn’t about cracking down on illegal immigration. It’s about compassion.

Slated to end two years ago but then reversed, the four-hour amnesty at the little park and other similar efforts show the Border Patrol is trying hard to shift lingering perceptions of its agents as ruthless hunters of those seeking a better life.

It’s that image that UCI students targeted recently when they leveled accusations that the “Border Patrol has historically enacted violence and unjust killings” as part of a petition to ban the Border Patrol from a campus job fair.

The petition, which gathered 650 signatures on the website Change.org, also said “having Border Patrol agents on campus is a blatant disregard to undocumented students’ safety and well-being.”

Agents subsequently agreed to not attend the job fair.

On a recent trip to the border, I learned that the Border Patrol in 2015 is far different than it was years ago, and so is its mission. Which makes a petition to ban an entire branch of the U.S. government as misguided as it is confusing.

CARTELS ARE PRIORITY

Border Patrol agent Frank Alvarado was born and raised in San Diego. Now 32, he was bused as a child in an effort to desegregate schools and, like Cody, grew up visiting relatives in Mexico. Bilingual, he shares with intentional irony as well as with some humor that his wife is part-way through law school to become a pro bono immigration attorney.

“The culture’s changed in the last 10 years,” Alvarado says of the border patrol. “We’re not all bad agents that people make us out to be.”

Border patrol agents still guard the border and pick up illegal immigrants. But Alvarado maintains the primary focus isn’t chasing moms, dads, children, students. Instead, the agency’s major goal is to prevent cartels from smuggling humans as well as illegal drugs.

Alvarado, whose grandfather and father served in the Navy, recalls the early 1990s when hundreds of undocumented immigrants would rush border gates, poring into the country. The highest number of apprehensions in the 60-mile San Diego sector was 628,000 in 1986.

Last year, there were 29,911 apprehensions.

Pointing out that the U.S. grants more than 1 million visas a year, the agent says there still is a need to secure the border.

Cruising between the two fences in Otay Mesa east of downtown Tijuana, Alvarado shows where a series of sophisticated smuggling tunnels were discovered and explains that cartels pay watchers to report agents’ movements. He also points to hundreds of scars along the secondary 18-foot fence.

First, he explains, a runner will hack an opening in the steel grate with an ax. Next, another runner will widen the hole with a portable power saw. Then people slip through.

The entire operation can take less than 2 minutes.

He says immigrants aren’t just the working poor. He cites Juan Francisco Lopez-Sanchez, an undocumented man and repeat felon who was deported five times before being charged in July with shooting and killing 32-year-old Kathryn Steinle in San Francisco.

“There’s a misconception,” Alvarado says, “that all people who come across are good people.”

NARCO TRAFFICKERS

Border Patrol agent Andrew Field sits behind the wheel of an SUV under camouflage netting that offers protection from the midday sun in San Ysidro. On this day it’s quiet. He allows that immigrants prefer the cover of darkness, especially when it’s combined with a thick marine layer of fog.

On those nights, Field says, he can’t see people. But he can hear dozens of footsteps.

As we talk, a lone man suddenly appears on the U.S. side of what agents call the primary fence. It is comprised of a seemingly never-ending series of 40-year-old rusty steel plates left from makeshift runways during the Vietnam War.

With binoculars at rest on the dashboard, Field watches the man make his way down a concrete slope. The man steps into a ravine as wide as a football field that turns into a debris-filled river during rains. On this day, there is barely a trickle. But bushes and weeds grow chest high, and the man wades into the brush.

He disappears for a moment. But then his head pokes up. He doesn’t move.

Field says it’s likely the man is homeless, possibly high on drugs and disoriented. Given time, he may wander back into Mexico, he said. So for the time being, agents merely monitor.

Several thousand yards down the channel, a very different scene unwinds. There, an agent has just caught a suspected illegal immigrant. It happens to be an area where a year ago the road collapsed, exposing a tunnel.

The UCI petition states, “Over 400 migrants die each year crossing the border.”

Alvarado acknowledges that people die trying to enter the U.S. But he blames criminal organizations that smuggle people in hot, enclosed trucks or fragile Panga boats that travel as far as 250 miles from shore.

“I’m not talking about mom-and-pop operations,” Alvarado says while he patrols the border in a white Suburban, gun, Taser and pepper spray strapped to his belt. “These are narco-trafficking organizations.”

The worst thing Alvarado’s seen in his eight years as an agent was when a smuggler abandoned two mothers with two children, one a baby. By the time agents found them in triple-digit temperatures, the baby was severely dehydrated and close to death.

“I know there’s a lot of desperation to have a better life,” says Alvarado, father of a 2-year-old son with a second boy on the way. “But it shouldn’t come to jeopardizing a baby.”

Alvarado heads west toward Imperial Beach. Along the secondary fence, rolls of razor-sharp concertina wire that were added just two weeks ago glisten in the sun.

I touch the wire and nearly slice open a finger. But the agent predicts thick carpeting or a mattress will be thrown over the razor wire, ladders put on top. He admits there is no way to stop someone determined to cross the border. “The wire just buys us more time to prevent them from breaking through.”

With the ocean in view from the bluff that makes up the U.S. side of Friendship Circle, Juan Zapata squats and pokes his fingers through the weathered grate. On the other side, his wife watches silently while father and son touch fingers.

FAMILY CONNECTIONS

Husband can’t hug his wife. Son can barely see his father through steel mesh. Yet it is enough of a connection that this family has come together this way several times over the last six months.

With his border agent badge glistening, Cody watches but doesn’t ask questions, demand documents or make an arrest. He says he has a 5-year-old son and a 2-year-old girl and believes that however limited, the tiny openings help build family unity.

Still, life on the line and shouts of “la migra” are never ending. Shortly after the Zapatas say their goodbyes, San Diego sector agents arrest two U.S. citizens in Campo for attempting to smuggle two men in the trunk of a Volvo.

The petition to ban the border patrol contends, “The border itself is also an arbitrary boundary line that serves to control migration and contributed to the notion of ‘illegal’ immigration, a term that dehumanizes our right to migrate freely.”

Part of that is arguably correct. Borders indeed are arbitrary, the result of wars, political battles, land purchases. But the statement “right to migrate freely” is problematic.

“We’re a country of immigrants,” Alvarado says, pointing out that as of 2011, the latest year available, 52 percent of agents were Latino. “But we’re also a country of laws.”

Contact the writer: dwhiting@ocregister.com