Five years after Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian assured employees that the company was “not working on any projects associated with immigration enforcement at the southern border,” federal contract documents reviewed by The Intercept show that the tech giant is at the center of project to upgrade the so-called virtual wall.

U.S. Customs and Border Protection is planning to modernize older video surveillance towers in Arizona that provide the agency an unblinking view of the border. A key part of the effort is adding machine-learning capabilities to CBP cameras, allowing the agency to automatically detect humans and vehicles as they approach the border without continuous monitoring by humans. CBP is purchasing computer vision powers from two vendors, IBM and Equitus. Google, the documents show, will play a critical role stitching those services together by operating a central repository for video surveillance data.

The work is focused on older towers purchased from Israeli military defense contractor Elbit. In all, the document notes “50 towers with up to 100 cameras across 6 sites in the Tucson Sector” will be upgraded with machine learning capabilities.

IBM will provide its Maximo Visual Inspection software, a tool the company generally markets for industrial quality control inspections — not tracking humans. Equitus is offering its Video Sentinel, a more traditional video surveillance........

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