Over the past weeks, the Trump administration has escalated its attacks on Somali immigrants in the U.S., through the use of racist rhetoric, restricting all immigration cases for Somalis already in the country, and launching an ICE operation reportedly targeting Somalis in the Minneapolis-St. Paul region. Here, the Somali-American chef and author Hawa Hassan reflects on her own journey to the U.S.—and, following on from her 2025 cookbook, Setting a Place for Us: Recipes and Stories of Displacement, Resilience, and Community from Eight Countries Impacted by War, how food has served as a means of bridging cultural divides in her own life and those of other Somali-Americans.

I was born in Mogadishu in the 1980s. A few years after my arrival, the air had already begun to thicken with the s

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