While celebrating the world labour's day yesterday, Labour unions and civil rights groups staged May Day rallies in several U.S. cities to denounce President Trump's get-tough policy on immigration.

Protests and marches challenging Trump's efforts at stepping up the deportation of illegal immigrants drew crowds by the thousands to the streets of New York, Washington, Los Angeles and San Francisco, with smaller gatherings popping up across the country.

A broad coalition of groups behind the events also took aim at various other Trump policies they saw as discriminatory or xenophobic, including his bid, so far blocked by the courts, to ban travelers from several Muslim countries and temporarily turn away all refugees, a crackdown they said preys on vulnerable workers in some of America's lowest-paying jobs.

A May Day gathering grew unruly in Portland, Oregon, where a group of black-clad protesters roamed downtown streets in the late afternoon, setting fires, breaking storefront windows, throwing projectiles and vandalizing a police cruiser.

Police, referring to the perpetrators as "anarchists," said they made more than two dozen arrests.
Nine people were also arrested in Olympia, the state capital in Washington, where protesters threw rocks, bottles and pepper-spray at police officers and broke the windows of downtown businesses..

A crowd of several thousand also assembled in Washington's Dupont Circle for a rally ahead of a planned procession to Lafayette Square, across the street from the White House.