MEXICO CITY — Just before an online meeting with Vice President Kamala Harris on Friday, Mexico President Andrés Manuel López Obrador very publicly accused the U.S. government of violating Mexico’s sovereignty.

The issue apparently didn’t arise in the meeting with Harris: “It’s not on the agenda and it’s not our intention to create a bad atmosphere,” López Obrador said ahead of the talks.

The meeting itself — the portion made public — focused on immigration, a key issue in the U.S.-Mexico relationship, along with trade, border security and the pandemic.

“We are going to help” on immigration, López Obrador told Harris. “You can count on us.”

But with Mexico facing key congressional and state elections on June 6, the nationalist president dedicated a good part of his news conference earlier in the day to expressing outrage over a funding decision by the U.S. Agency for International Development.

“It is an interventionist act that violated our sovereignty,” said López Obrador, who added that Mexico had filed a diplomatic note with the U.S. Embassy.

Less than two hours later, it was all smiles and compliments when López Obrador and Harris met — at least in the publicly shown prelude to the closed meeting.

The Mexican president wants the U.S. to fund a major expansion of one of his signature programs, “Planting Life,” which provides cash payments to farmers who plant certain fruit and lumber trees. The aim has been to help keep Mexicans in their rural communities.

The more challenging part of López Obrador’s pitch is that the U.S. grant six-month work visas, and eventually citizenship, to those who participate in the program.

In the diplomatic note shown by López Obrador on Friday, Mexico assures that it respects the role of civil society organizations and shares an interest in eliminating corruption, but says that people connected to the group “have been explicit in their political militancy against the government of Mexico.”

The note, dated Thursday, asked the U.S. Embassy to confirm financial support from the U.S. Agency for International Development and if so, suspend it. USAID often supports civil society groups, usually related to human rights or democracy promotion, in many countries. In some countries, such groups sometimes run afoul of local governments.

A State Department spokesman said Friday: “As the Vice President said today, Mexico is our closest neighbor. We share not only a border but the values of dignity and respect. We have built a productive partnership to address the causes of insecurity, and that partnership has never been more important.”