Tens of thousands have peacefully chanted, picketed and protested against President Donald Trump's immigration and labour policies on May Day, despite a small pocket of violent unrest in the Pacific northwest.
Protests and marches on Monday 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.
Groups behind the events also took aim at other Trump policies they saw as discriminatory or xenophobic, including his bid, so far blocked by the courts, to ban travellers from several Muslim countries and temporarily turn away all refugees.
But the primary impetus cited by civil liberties and labour activists was Trump's strict new immigration enforcement policy - falling most heavily on undocumented workers who toil in low-paying, non-unionised sectors such as hospitality, childcare and agriculture.
Peaceful protesters flocked to the streets in Chicago.
At the White House gates, they demanded "Donald Trump has got to go!"
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 vandalising 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, according to a Fox affiliate.
Rallies elsewhere across the country were boisterous but mostly orderly.
