Two men arrested for climbing out of a New York City manhole steps from where world leaders gathered for the United Nations General Assembly were released without bail — exposing not just a crime trend but a glaring vulnerability in how little the city monitors its own underground entry points.

Kevin Rodriguez, 26, and Samuel Reveron, 25, were arrested Thursday in Queens after surveillance video caught them and at least four others prying open a sewer cover near East 61st Street and Park Avenue, descending into the tunnels, and later emerging to drive off in two Toyota Corollas, according to court documents reported by the New York Post. The location sits steps from the Loews Regency New York hotel, where Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu stayed during the UNGA.

Reveron, a Venezuelan citizen who illegally entered the United States, allegedly told police exactly what they were doing down there: "We go into the sewer and look for valuables that get stuck in the storm drains and sewers, gold, anything of value."

Both men were charged with trespassing and conspiracy. Both walked free. Reveron got supervised release; Rodriguez was released on his own recognizance. No bond required — because the charges didn't qualify for bail setting, according to court documents reviewed by WABC.

The Guardian framed this as a quirky crime story about the so-called "mole people," noting the NYPD said the case met the "same criteria" as other incidents of people entering sewers to scavenge after storms. The Post played up the C.H.U.D. movie references and the men's nationalities. Both outlets missed the infrastructure question staring every New Yorker in the face: if scavengers can pop out of manholes near world leaders with nobody noticing until a 911 caller reports it, what else is moving through those tunnels unmonitored?

This isn't isolated. In late August, viral video showed three headlamp-wearing figures in overalls climbing out of a manhole near Madison Square Garden and Penn Station — one of the busiest transit hubs in the Western Hemisphere. In May, large groups of men were spotted plunging into manholes in Williamsburg and Gravesend, Brooklyn, in the early morning hours. A witness in June told NBC New York: "Three random guys walking around in a strange suit, open the sewer, go in like Ninja Turtles."

The NYPD said it was conducting "additional security sweeps" with federal partners "out of an abundance of caution given the UN general assembly and the sensitivity of the location." That's comforting after the fact. The city's subterranean network — storm drains, sewers, steam tunnels, subway passages — spans hundreds of miles of largely unmonitored infrastructure. License plate readers eventually identified the cars this time. Nobody stopped anyone from going underground in the first place.

The southern border gets the headlines, and rightly so — fentanyl, cartel traffic, and millions of illegal crossings are a crisis. But the same complacency that leaves the southern border porous leaves America's urban infrastructure wide open. The same system that releases trespassers near world leaders without bond is the system that can't tell you who — or what — is moving beneath your streets until they literally climb out of a manhole in front of you.

The question isn't whether these two were scavengers or something worse. The question is how a city of 8 million people has no idea who's underground until they surface.