"She said she discovered the island, but the island belongs to us," an Albanian man told reporters, his voice tight with anger. "I was mad, because the island is ours, not hers." He stood at the edge of a small crowd that has spent two weeks contesting a luxury resort proposal that Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner are backing on Sazan Island.
The project has become the focal point of some of Albania's largest demonstrations in years. Protesters point to video that set off the uprising: private security guards violently detaining an activist who had been protesting the proposed development inside a protected nature preserve. The footage, and the subsequent crowding of streets and shorelines, pushed the dispute into the national spotlight during week two of the protests.
Trump and Kushner have promoted a lavish plan for Sazan and its surroundings. In 2024, Kushner posted renderings of the proposal on Instagram. Trump described the site on a recent podcast, saying, "It's an unbelievable beautiful 1,400-hectare private island in the middle of the Mediterranean." She added that "Not only the island, but we have five miles of beachfront directly across from the island, this beautiful peninsula with a lagoon on one side, the ocean on the other, beautiful white sand beaches."
Those public remarks helped crystallize local fury. Protesters stress that Sazan is the westernmost point of Albania, a former Cold War–era base that is now a vibrant nature preserve and home to an iconic pink bird. The area across from the island includes white sand beaches on protected land. A report describes the island as public property, and residents say the coastline should remain accessible to the country that surrounds it.
The strongest, most immediate fact driving turnout is the video of the activist's detention. Demonstrators fed on that moment: the image of private security personnel forcibly removing a citizen protesting a development inside an area protected for wildlife. For many in the crowd, the incident confirmed long-held suspicions that outside capital and intimate ties to local power would trump public use and environmental protections.
Ivanka Trump framed her involvement personally — "You know, it's not even a business for me, despite the scale of it," she said — and told a story of stumbling across the island while on a friend's boat. "We were on a friend's boat and we stopped for a swim. Effectively, that's how we found it," she said, underlining a narrative of private discovery that clashes with how locals see the place: not a prize to be found but a public site to be defended.
The friction between those two narratives — a celebrity-backed development framed as a rare private asset and Albanian insistence that Sazan and surrounding beaches are public and protected — is the core of today's unrest. Protesters are not only objecting to one project; many say the episode taps broader anger over corruption and the outsized role of foreign-backed investments in Albania's shoreline.
Local voices have been blunt. The Albanian man's complaint echoed across the crowd: a sense that the island has been spoken for without local consent. Authorities have not announced a start date for any construction, and no definitive legal resolution has been published about ownership or permitted use that would clear the way for the scheme.
For Trump and Kushner, the political cost has accelerated beyond a planning debate. Images of the preserve, its pink bird, and the detained activist have bound environmental and sovereignty concerns to the high-profile names promoting the project. Kushner's Instagram renderings in 2024 gave the plan visual life; Trump's recent on-air description supplied a language of possession that Albanians found inflammatory.
The central unresolved question now is stark: can a development pitched by two well-known American figures proceed when locals insist the island is public property and when protests have repeatedly invoked protected-status land and corruption? That gap between a celebrated private vision and a contested public reality is what will determine whether the demonstrations fade, harden into formal legal challenges, or force a reshaping of the proposal.
