May Day: 'We deserve to be allowed to stay here'

Every May 1 immigrants gather across the country to demand more rights. On Sunday, immigrants met at Judkins Park in the Central Area.

And in Seattle, a different group of protesters descends on downtown Seattle in the evening. This year, five police officers were injured and nine people — eight males and one juvenile female — were arrested.

According to the Seattle Police Twitter feed, one officer was bitten, one was hit by a molotov and one received a laceration to the head after being hit in the head by a rock. The condition of the others wasn't noted.

Here's a dispatch from earlier in the day, when marchers told us about needing immigration reform on many levels:

We come here every year. We are undocumented, we've been living here for 25 years without documentation. But we both work full time and another part time job. So we pay, you know, a lot of money in taxes. We feel like we deserve to be allowed to stay here because we are working hard.

I work for the Tukwila school district and with a lot of immigrant families. I think because of the dialog happening nationally around immigration, and particularly the rhetoric, the attacks against undocumented immigrants, I think being visible is just so needed. The struggle is daily. Everything is on the line, every day.

I was a former immigrant but I'm a U.S. citizen now. I want to exercise my right and to be supportive of people who don't have the right and deserve the same respect and the same equality.

KUOW's Isolde Raftery contributed to this report.