Three senators have filed a bill that would require Customs and Border Protection to inspect at least one in ten vehicles heading south into Mexico. The subject is not what the cartels send north. It is what they buy with, and what they shoot with, Just the News reported Sunday.

The Enhancing Southbound Inspections to Combat Cartels Act is filed as S.1138. Maggie Hassan of New Hampshire, a Democrat, brought it with two Republicans, Jon Husted of Ohio and James Lankford of Oklahoma.

The traffic it targets runs the opposite direction from the one that gets the attention. Guns bought in the United States and cash earned selling drugs in the United States both travel south, and both are what keep a cartel operating.

“Dismantling drug cartels requires cutting off the flow of illegal firearms and cartel money moving from the U.S. into Mexico,” Hassan said. Husted put it plainly: alongside stopping the drugs, “we also need to cut off the weapons and funding that allow drug cartels to operate.”

Lankford’s objection is about capacity rather than intent. Customs and Border Protection, he said, “still doesn’t have the resources they need to stop gun smuggling to the criminal cartels in Mexico.”

The bill answers that with numbers. A minimum inspection rate of ten percent on southbound vehicles. Fifty more X-ray inspection systems, placed at the busiest crossings between California and Texas.

It would also authorize at least 100 additional Homeland Security Investigations agents assigned to guns and money moving south, and at least 100 more for drug smuggling, human trafficking, child trafficking and illegal entries moving north. Support staff for those agents is authorized alongside them.

It covers the northern border as well, and it directs the Department of Homeland Security to work out what inspecting traffic in both directions, with Mexico and with Canada, would actually take. Reporting requirements and mandatory minimum inspection rates are written in.

Two things are worth stating about where it stands.

It has been filed and nothing more. There is no committee action, no markup, no vote and no cosponsor list beyond the three names on it. Most filed bills die without a hearing.

And the reporting carries no figure for how many guns or how much cash crosses south in a year, which is the number that would tell you whether ten percent is a serious threshold or a gesture. The Trump administration says illegal crossings northbound are down more than 90 percent. Nobody has published the matching figure for the traffic going the other way.