On May 1, 2006, millions of immigrants and their supporters took to the streets in scores of towns and cities to demand amnesty for undocumented workers and an end to punitive anti-immigrant legislation.

Today, two years later, there were small, scattered protests across the country. In New York, 500-1,000 people marched where 100,000 plus marched two years ago. In Los Angeles, the turnout was 5,000 where two years ago there were a half-million or more demonstrators.

The difference, of course, is that the Bush administration’s response to the immigrant rights upsurge of 2006 has been to launch workplace raids across the country, netting hundreds of thousands of undocumented workers and driving the rest back into the shadows.

Those raids–aimed at those poorly paid workers who harvest our fruits and vegetables, wash our dishes, take care of the children of the well-to-do and even mow Mitt Romney’s lawn–have been driven by more than just irrational, Mexican-hating xenophobia and a desire to extend the powers of the national security state.

The raids have also become a goldmine for the burgeoning immigrant detention industry and its largest company: Corrections Corporation of America (CCA), and CCA is poised to continue cashing in. All this has been documented in great detail at businessofdetention.com, a new multi-media website produced by a pair of Columbia J-School graduate students Renee Feltz and Stokely Basch.

Businessofdetention.com pulls the whole story together—from showing the nuts and bolts of how CCA works to the fat contracts they feed on, to their soaring profits to the web of political connections that make CCA’s success possible. And it explains what is going on not only with text but video and audio clips and interactive charts and graphs that pull you through this complex story.

Conflict of interest disclosure: I’ve been dating Renee for the past 10 months so I may be a little biased about how good this site is but seriously, if you are interested in the subject, I think you will find this site to be quite useful.