Boston Mayor Michelle Wu’s city is staring down a $48.4 million budget deficit. Roads need fixing. Schools need funding. The T is falling apart. So naturally, Wu’s office partnered with a group called OUTnewcomers to hand out $500 vouchers for massages, yoga, acupuncture, and hair salon visits — exclusively for “queer and trans” illegal migrants.
You can’t afford a massage. But the guy who hopped the border last month? Hot stone treatment, on your dime. Welcome to America, here’s your spa package.
The program is called “Project: Belonging Matters,” which is the kind of name that could only be invented by someone who has never once worried about making rent. The vouchers range from $250 to $500 per person and are redeemable at participating wellness providers around Boston. “Creative healing” is one of the listed services. We don’t know what “creative healing” is, and frankly, we’re afraid to ask.
OUTnewcomers is run by a guy named Sal Khan — an openly queer migrant activist from Pakistan who performs in drag under the name “Miss Chilly Masala.” Khan was arrested in 2024 on an MBTA bus for resisting arrest and trespassing. This is the person the City of Boston decided should be in charge of distributing your tax dollars.
(Can’t make this up if you tried.)
The city dropped over $1.3 million in March 2026 on organizations like OUTnewcomers through the Mayor’s Office for Immigrant Advancement. That’s taxpayer money from the city’s operating budget. The same budget that’s $48 million short.
Now here’s where it gets really fun. Once the story blew up — thanks to Libs of TikTok and about twelve million furious Americans on social media — OUTnewcomers started backpedaling faster than a circus unicyclist. They claimed the vouchers were actually “small vouchers of $50 or less.”
Except their own promotional flyer says $250 to $500. It’s right there. In print. That they made.
They also claimed “no funds have been distributed or directed for those purposes.” Then Mayor Wu’s office chimed in and denied providing direct funding to the initiative — which is strange, because OUTnewcomers’ own materials list the Mayor’s Office for Immigrant Advancement as a partner.
So either everybody’s lying, or nobody at City Hall knows what anybody else is doing. Neither option is great.
One commenter summed it up perfectly: “I’ve had 3 massages in my entire life of 52 years. Because I cannot afford them.” That’s the average American taxpayer right there — working fifty-hour weeks, skipping the chiropractor because the copay’s too high, and watching their city government roll out the red carpet for people who aren’t supposed to be here in the first place.
The program has since been “paused” — which in government-speak means they’re waiting for everybody to stop paying attention so they can quietly restart it in six months.
And the grant funding it? Cut from the fiscal year 2027 budget. So there’s your silver lining — it took a national embarrassment, but at least someone in Boston finally found a line item they were willing to cut.
This is what Democrats do. They will tell you there’s no money for your kids’ schools, no money for police, no money for roads. But there’s always money for the latest progressive vanity project. Always money to signal how compassionate they are with YOUR wallet.
Michelle Wu’s Boston: $48 million in debt, crumbling infrastructure, and a drag queen handing out spa vouchers to illegal immigrants. Somewhere, the Founding Fathers are looking down and wondering why they bothered.
