Trump Billion Pound Project Leaves Rural Vietnam in Tears as Families Are Ordered to Dig Up Longstanding Graveyards

Ancestral graves that have stood untouched since before the fall of Saigon are being exhumed by weeping farming families to make way for a £1.15 billion ($1.5 billion) Trump Organisation golf resort in northern Vietnam.

The development, branded Trump International, Vietnam, spans 990 hectares (2,446 acres) of fertile agricultural land in Hung Yen province, roughly 40 kilometres southeast of Hanoi. It is set to include three 18-hole championship golf courses, five-star hotels, and ultra-luxury residential estates. The project is already displacing over 4,000 households, clearing the graves of their dead, and doing so under conditions that experts in Vietnamese law say broke the country's own approval processes.

Graves Marked With an 'X', Families Left Outraged

The Chau Ninh commune cemetery is being dismantled in stages. Graves marked with large painted 'X' symbols indicate that families have already removed remains ahead of construction crews. Others remain untouched, their owners refusing to comply.

Hoang Do, 72, was paid 70 million dong, equivalent to just £2,040 ($2,660), to exhume the remains of his son and both parents. 'It's painful,' he told an outlet. 'I'm outraged by the compensation price.'

Hoang Anh Xa, who has five relatives buried in the affected cemetery, questioned the entire premise. 'The grave of my great-grandparents has been there since 1967, before the establishment of this country,' he told the Financial Times. 'So why should I move them?' Local farmer Tran Minh Hai was equally direct: 'It's a spiritual thing. People don't want to disturb the graves.'

A Deal Struck in the Shadow of Tariff Threats

The project is the Trump Organisation's first partnership in Vietnam, announced in October 2024 alongside Vietnamese developer Kinhbac City Development Corporation (KBC). Vietnamese regulatory filings confirm that KBC paid the Trump Organisation £3.84 million ($5 million) in brand licensing rights for use of the Trump name. The Trump family business will manage the club once complete but is not responsible for farmer compensation or development investment.

Vietnam's Deputy Prime Minister Tran Hong Ha approved the project on 16 May 2025. The groundbreaking followed just five days later, on 21 May 2025, with Eric Trump and Vietnamese Prime Minister Pham Minh Chinh attending in person. The Prime Minister said Eric Trump's visit 'motivated us to expedite this project' and pledged maximum government support to meet the 2027 completion deadline.

The speed of that approval has drawn sustained criticism. Documents reviewed by The New York Times showed that Vietnamese authorities skipped standard environmental reviews and truncated the public consultation period, with some review steps still ongoing when the groundbreaking took place. Experts in Vietnamese law told the Times the pace of approval was alarming. One local, Le Van Truong, 54, was quoted as saying he could lose both his farmland and the cemetery holding five generations of his ancestors.

The diplomatic context is impossible to ignore. At the time of approval, Vietnam faced a threatened 46 per cent US import tariff on its goods. Nguyen Khac Giang, a visiting fellow at the ISEAS Yusof Ishak Institute in Singapore, told The Business Standard: 'There is a growing sense that Vietnam needs to do more in order to please the Trump administration in terms of trade, tariff and intellectual property concerns.'

White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt, responding to questions about the project's optics, told reporters that the President had placed his businesses in a blind trust controlled by his children, a characterisation that has been disputed by independent ethics experts.

Farmers Who Cannot Farm, and Compensation That Does Not Cover a Year's Wages

Reuters, reporting exclusively from Hung Yen in August 2025, documented the scope of what farmers were being offered. Nguyen Thi Huong, 50, was told to vacate her 200-square-metre plot in exchange for £2,460 ($3,200) and rice provisions, less than the average annual wage in Vietnam. 'The whole village is worried about this project because it will take our land and leave us jobless,' she told Reuters. Reuters also confirmed, citing six people with direct knowledge and documents, that by that point developers had cut the total compensation budget from an initial estimate exceeding £384 million ($500 million), though no reasons were given for the reduction.

The land being cleared currently supports fruit farms growing bananas, longan, and other crops. Many of the displaced farmers are elderly. Hoang Anh Xa, who also stands to lose his farming livelihood, was unambiguous about the position he and his neighbours have been placed in. 'We do not oppose the policy of the Party and the government,' Xa told the Financial Times. 'I won't be able to find another job.'

Eric Trump, speaking at the groundbreaking ceremony in May 2025, described the project as 'the envy of all of Asia and the entire world.' At that same moment, hundreds of farmers watched from a dyke overlooking the orchards and fields that would be cleared for the luxury complex, according to AFP reporting from the scene.

For the communities of Hung Yen province, the calculus is not the same as it is in Hung Yen.