“Google Is Helping the Trump Administration Deploy AI Along the Mexican Border”, 3

April 2025

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...

…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 document notes “50 towers with up to 100 cameras across 6 sites in the Tucson Sector” will be upgraded with machine learning capabilities...

“This project will focus initially on 100 simultaneous video streams from the data source for processing,” the document reads, and “the resulting metadata and keyframes will be sent to CBP’s Google Cloud.”

In a statement provided to The Intercept, Google Public Sector executive Jim Kelly... wrote. “In this case, Google Cloud is not on the contract... customers or partners can purchase Google Cloud’s off-the-shelf compute, storage, and networking products for their own use...” Dave Maass, director of investigations at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, told The Intercept... “adding AI isn’t going to make it any less of a boondoggle — it will just be an AI-powered boondoggle.”