NY Home Depot hires guards, dogs to keep parking lot safe from thieves, aggressive migrants

A New York Home Depot has deployed a guard dog — and other stores may be close behind — to protect shoppers from aggressive migrants and thieves flooding their parking lots, The Post has learned.

Two men wearing MSA Security caps and bulletproof vests with a German Shepherd in tow patrolled the Home Depot in New Rochelle on Tuesday.

“It’s more about omnipresence,” one guard said, explaining that the company was contracted a few weeks ago. “It’s not like we let them go bite anyone or anything.”

The guard said the store hired them for a number of reasons.

“It’s not just because of [migrants], but because of a myriad of other things too, like people breaking into cars, that kind of stuff,” he said.

The guarded New Rochelle lot was quiet and no migrants loitered there when The Post visited this week, however, seven miles away in Throggs Neck, The Bronx, at least 30 male migrants hovered at the doors of Home Depot.

Some were day laborers simply trying to “shape” for work with local contractors.

But many others aggressively confronted shoppers, trying to sell them phony Apple Airpods or soliciting tips for lifting items from shopping carts into cars — even when uninvited.

“You come out and you’re a woman by yourself, they literally leech onto your wagon, and you’re like ‘No, I don’t need any help,’” one worker said. “And when they’re following you to your car, it’s unnerving.”

She said a female supervisor saw one of the men washing his privates with a water bottle in the lot, and that several women have called customer service to complain that migrants robbed them of purses or phones.

She’s seen the number of grifters in the lot swell as the migrant population in New York City explodes.

“I came to work one day and there had to be 100 guys out here,” she said. “And I’m like, ‘Oh, my God!’”

A regular customer at the store, who asked to be identified only as Cheryl, said she and her husband had a frightening encounter last month.

Source: https://nypost.com/2024/04/21/us-news/home-depot-stores-look-to-security-to-keep-migrants-at-bay/