A previously inconspicuous blog post on Microsoft’s corporate Web site, promoting the tech giant’s contract with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, has ignited workplace frustrations at Microsoft over the Trump administration’s hard-line immigration policies. The post went largely unnoticed when it was first published in January, touting “ICE’s decision to accelerate I.T. modernization using Azure Government”—a cloud-computing platform that Microsoft says will enable immigration-enforcement officers to “utilize deep learning capabilities to accelerate facial recognition and identification.” But it exploded into public view this week amid the media uproar over the administration’s decision to separate thousands of undocumented children from their parents as a deterrent against illegal border crossings. A Microsoft employee, noticing the sudden backlash on social media, made the matter worse by deleting the blog post, forcing Microsoft to backtrack when contacted by reporters. The restored language affirms that Microsoft is “proud” to support ICE’s work with its “mission-critical cloud.” (On Monday, Microsoft said it was “dismayed” by the Trump administration's decision to forcibly separate families at the border).

Microsoft employees, some of whom had no idea the company had a contract with ICE, told me they were stunned and demoralized by the news. “It’s disgusting, although not really surprising, and it upsets me that the company I work for is collaborating with those human-rights abusers,” one employee told me. The discontent grew this week as word of the partnership spread throughout the company. Employees are “frustrated,” a different employee told me. “This could be Microsoft’s Project Maven moment,” this person added, referring to Google’s contract to provide artificial-intelligence analysis for the Pentagon’s drone program, which it decided not to renew after about a dozen employees resigned in protest.

While the scandal at Microsoft has not yet reached those proportions, another employee told me that they had spoken privately to co-workers about addressing Microsoft leadership, urging executives to cancel the contract with ICE. “The ‘proud to support’ statement doesn’t reflect the opinions of all of us,” this employee told me. A fourth employee, who called the partnership “shameful,” was even more outspoken: “It hits a little too close to IBM’s work during the Holocaust for me.” On Tuesday, more than 100 Microsoft employees posted an open letter to Microsoft’s internal message board protesting Microsoft’s work with ICE. “We believe that Microsoft must take an ethical stand, and put children and families above profits,” read the letter addressed to C.E.O. Satya Nadella. (Microsoft did not respond to a request for comment.)

The apparent unrest at Microsoft confirms growing fears inside Silicon Valley and among civil-liberties activists that A.I. technology will be misused by law enforcement. Last month, the American Civil Liberties Union published a letter urging Amazon to stop selling its advanced facial-recognition technology to police departments, warning that the software is “primed for abuse in the hands of governments.” (The city of Newark, New Jersey, recently began running 24/7 surveillance footage of its city streets on a publicly accessible Web site, in order to let residents police each other.) Similar technology is already widespread in China, where A.I.-powered surveillance cameras have been used to monitor schools, fine residents for jaywalking, and even pick out an alleged thief in a crowd of 20,000.

Microsoft, for its part, has been deeply involved in the surveillance-state game for a while. Several years ago, the company launched a public initiative to deploy predictive police-surveillance tools. Microsoft has previously marketed its machine-learning software as 90 percent effective at predicting whether an inmate is likely to commit another crime, for instance. But for some employees, partnering with the Trump administration—which Nadella vociferously condemned in January 2017 for its so-called Muslim ban—appears to be a bridge too far. “I hope they end the contract,” the first Microsoft employee I spoke with told me. This person added that “the official Microsoft response”—in which the company said it was “dismayed” by the forcible separation of children at the border—had been “pretty inadequate.” Nadella responded to the open letter late on Tuesday with a memo of his own. He called the separation of children and their parents at the border “cruel and abusive,” adding that Microsoft was not working with the U.S. government on family separations. “Our current cloud engagement with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) is supporting legacy mail, calendar, messaging and document management workloads,” he wrote.

Others in Silicon Valley have been more vocal about the Trump administration. Airbnb described the family-separation policy as “heartless, cruel, immoral.” One Silicon Valley couple raised more than $5.5 million using a Facebook fund-raiser to donate to a fund to reunite immigrant parents with their children. (Among the tens of thousands who have donated to the campaign are Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg.) Box C.E.O. Aaron Levie, who has voiced frequent disdain for the Trump administration, called the separation of families at the border “inhumane and un-American.” Twilio’s Jeff Lawson, going further than all the rest, called it “a war crime.”