By WILL WEISSERT

WASHINGTON (AP) — President Joe Biden plans to meet with Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador on Tuesday for discussions the White House says will showcase the underlying strength of a relationship that of late has been more notable for the leaders’ disagreements on issues including energy and Ukraine policy.

López Obrador declined Biden’s invitation to the Summit of the Americas in Los Angeles last month after unsuccessfully urging the U.S. to include the leaders of Cuba, Nicaragua and Venezuela — all countries with anti-democratic regimes. The Mexican leader also has called U.S. support for Ukraine in its war with Russia “a crass error” and criticized the U.S. for moving more swiftly to provide military funding to Ukraine than financial aid to Central America.

There also are political crosscurrents in Washington, where top Republicans have pointed to a rising number of people from Mexico and Central America crossing the southern U.S. border illegally and have criticized the Democratic president’s administration for not doing more to curb the migration.

It will be the second in-person meeting between Biden and López Obrador at the White House. In addition, they spoke virtually amid the coronavirus pandemic last year and have held several calls. First lady Jill Biden hosted Mexican first lady Beatriz Gutiérrez Müller during this spring’s White House celebration of Cinco de Mayo.

Tuesday’s discussions come just before Biden leaves for Israel, the West Bank and Saudi Arabia.

Senior Biden administration officials say that the U.S.-Mexico relationship is a priority and that the countries plan to announce joint actions to modernize and improve infrastructure along key parts of the 2,000-mile (3,200-kilometer) border, enhance law enforcement cooperation against fentanyl smuggling and promote clean energy.

They also plan to announce a working group to promote more avenues for legal migration by workers, discussions that the officials said they hope could eventually be expanded to include labor from other countries.

In a preview call with reporters, administration officials declined to specify which visa programs might be expanded to bolster legal migration or by how much. They said the agreements set to come out of the meeting were more about demonstrating cooperation than announcing specific numbers.

The officials also didn’t say whether the Biden administration will urge Mexico to do more to stop people heading through its territory to then cross into the U.S. illegally — a key demand of Biden’s predecessor, President Donald Trump. Instead, the officials said Mexico and the U.S. are equal partners on immigration, and both countries had already previously committed to bolstering mechanisms for processing arriving migrants who ask for asylum, while more efficiently expelling those who don’t qualify.

Vice President Kamala Harris, who has been tasked with exploring the root causes of immigration across Latin America, also plans to host López Obrador in a breakfast Tuesday.

López Obrador has long pushed for expanding U.S. temporary visa programs to workers from Mexico and Central America. He said Monday that increasing legal immigration would help fight inflation by bolstering productivity.

Mexico’s president also has been more vocal about attempting to tamp down inflation than curb climate change or promote energy efficiency. U.S. officials want him to retreat on his reliance on fossil fuels and his efforts to prioritize his country’s state-owned electricity utility at the expense of foreign-built plants powered by natural gas and renewable energy, another topic that could come up.

López Obrador has repeatedly criticized the Biden administration, including decrying U.S. efforts to extradite Wikileaks founder Julian Assange from the U.K. for prosecution. He has vowed to bring up the topic during Tuesday’s meeting, and Biden officials say they are ready to discuss it.

By ALANNA DURKIN RICHER, MICHELLE R. SMITH and MICHAEL KUNZELMAN

The Associated Press – After members of the far-right Oath Keepers extremist group stormed the U.S. Capitol on Jan 6, 2021, their leader called someone on the phone with an urgent message for then-President Donald Trump, another extremist told investigators.

While gathered in a private suite at the Phoenix Park Hotel, an Oath Keeper member says he heard their leader, Stewart Rhodes, repeatedly urge the person on the phone to tell Trump to call upon militia groups to fight to keep the president in power.

“I just want to fight,” Rhodes said after hanging up with the person, who denied Rhodes’ appeal to speak directly to the Republican president, court records say.

Federal prosecutors have not said who they believe Rhodes was speaking to on that call, which was detailed in court documents in the case of an Oath Keeper member who has pleaded guilty in the riot. An attorney for Rhodes says the call never happened.

The story, however, has raised questions about whether the extremist group boss may have had the ear of someone close to Trump on Jan. 6 — an issue that could take center stage when the House committee that’s investigating the insurrection holds its next public hearing on Tuesday.

The Jan. 6 committee has said it is looking closely at any ties between people in Trump’s orbit and extremist groups accused of helping put into motion the violence at the Capitol.

Top leaders and members of the Oath Keepers and another far-right group — the Proud Boys — have been charged with seditious conspiracy in the most serious cases the Justice Department has brought so far in the Jan. 6 attack.

Neither federal prosecutors nor House investigators have alleged that anyone in the Trump White House was in communication with extremist groups in the run-up to Jan. 6.

But at least two men close to Trump — longtime friend Roger Stone and his former national security adviser Michael Flynn — have known contacts with far-right groups and extremists who, in some cases, are alleged to have been involved in Jan. 6.

Cassidy Hutchinson, a former aide to Trump White House chief of staff Mark Meadows, also told the House committee that she heard the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers mentioned leading up to the “Stop the Steal” rally in Washington on Jan. 6. But no further details about that have been revealed.

Cassie Miller, a Southern Poverty Law Center senior research analyst who has provided the committee with information about extremists, said she expects lawmakers to build on that testimony and possibly reveal more information about connections between people close to Trump and groups like the Oath Keepers and Proud Boys.

“Right now, things are very blurry,” Miller said.

During the committee’s last televised hearing, Hutchinson told lawmakers that Trump instructed Meadows to speak with Stone and Flynn the day before the riot. Hutchinson said Meadows called both Flynn and Stone on the evening of Jan. 5, but she said she didn’t know what they spoke about.

In posts on the social media platform Telegram after the hearing, Stone denied ever speaking to Meadows on the phone. When asked by The Associated Press for comment about the call, Flynn’s brother replied in an email that the Jan. 6 hearing “is a clown show.”

Neither Stone nor Flynn has been charged in connection to the Capitol riot, and both of them have invoked their Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination before the House committee. Trump pardoned each of them after they were convicted by jurors or pleaded guilty in cases unrelated to Jan. 6.

During events in Washington before the riot, Stone used members of the Oath Keepers — a far-right militia group that recruits current and former military, first responders and law enforcement — as security guards.

Photos and video on Jan. 5 and 6 show Stone flanked by people dressed in Oath Keepers gear. Among them was Joshua James, then the leader of the group’s Alabama chapter, who has pleaded guilty to seditious conspiracy and is cooperating with authorities investigating the insurrection.

Stone, an informal Trump adviser, has denied having any knowledge of or involvement in anything illegal on Jan. 6.

“The Oath Keepers provided security for me on the voluntary basis on January 5. Nothing more nothing less,” he wrote recently on Telegram.

On Friday, attorneys for Rhodes told the committee that their client wants to testify in person and publicly. A spokesperson for the committee declined to comment, but it’s unlikely lawmakers would agree to Rhodes’ conditions.

The committee already interviewed Rhodes for hours behind closed doors, but he invoked his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination under the direction of his attorneys when asked about the post-election period, one of his lawyers, James Lee Bright, told the AP. Bright said Rhodes now wants to “confront the narrative they are portraying,” which he believes is “completely wrong.”

Rhodes, a former U.S. Army paratrooper, and four co-defendants are scheduled for trial in Washington in September. The Oath Keepers have largely avoided public forums since Jan. 6, and it’s unclear who is handling the “day to day” operations of the group with Rhodes behind bars, said Oren Segal, vice president of the Anti-Defamation League’s Center on Extremism.

The Oath Keepers have denied there was any plan to storm the Capitol. They say their communications and planning leading up to Jan. 6 was only about providing security for right-wing figures like Stone before the riot as well as protecting themselves against possible attacks from antifa activists.

Stone has also not been shy about a close association with Enrique Tarrio, the former Proud Boys chairman who is scheduled to stand trial in December on sedition charges alongside other members of the extremist group that refers to itself as a politically incorrect men’s club for “Western chauvinists.”

In February 2019 — one month after being charged with witness tampering and other crimes in special counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia investigation — Stone was summoned back to court to answer for a post on his Instagram account featuring a photo of the judge with what appeared to be the crosshairs of a gun. On the witness stand, Stone publicly identified Tarrio as one of five or six “volunteers” who provided him with images and content to post on social media. Stone said his house functioned as a headquarters for his volunteers.

Trump commuted Stone’s 40-month prison sentence in that case days before he was due to report to prison and pardoned him months later.

The Proud Boys have been trying to forge connections with mainstream Republican figures since Vice Media co-founder Gavin McInnes started the group in 2016, Miller said.

A Proud Boys member told the Jan. 6 committee that membership in the group skyrocketed after Trump refused to outright condemn the group during his first debate with Biden. Instead, Trump told the Proud Boys to “stand back and stand by.”

And while extremist groups tend to collapse after law-enforcement authorities jail their top leaders, that hasn’t seemed to have happened to the Proud Boys. Despite a brief lull in activity after the riot, 2021 became one of the most active years for the extremist group, according to Miller.

Flynn also had contact with some far-right groups before Jan. 6. In the weeks after the election, Flynn became a leading figure in the campaign to sow doubt about the results and urge Trump to take extraordinary measures to stay in power.

Flynn called Trump’s loss a “coup in progress,” and publicly suggested Trump should seize voting machines and floated the idea of martial law. He and several allies ultimately brought those ideas directly to Trump in an Oval Office meeting that December. Flynn was also a featured speaker at a large rally in Washington on Dec. 12, 2020, backing Trump’s desperate efforts to subvert his election loss.

In text messages later filed in court, Rhodes — the Oath Keepers leader — and other members discussed how members of the group had worked with another far-right group, 1st Amendment Praetorians, or 1AP, to provide personal security to Flynn that day. A photograph taken by UPI shows Flynn leaving the rally with Rhodes and at least one member of 1AP.

The House committee has subpoenaed 1AP Founder Robert Patrick Lewis, noting in a letter to Lewis that he claimed to coordinate regularly with Flynn and also claimed to be in contact with Rhodes prior to Jan. 6.

Lewis, who has not been charged in Jan. 6, has said the group was made up of military and law enforcement veterans, and provided pro bono security and intelligence in the months after the election. In a recent defamation lawsuit, Lewis and another member of 1AP, Philip Luelsdorff, have denied involvement with the planning or execution of the Capitol attack, and said that 1AP has never been a militia or paramilitary group.

Flynn pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI during the Russia investigation before being pardoned by Trump a little more than a month before the Capitol riot.

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Richer reported from Boston, Smith from Providence, Rhode Island, and Kunzelman from College Park, Maryland. Associated Press writer Eric Tucker in Washington contributed to this report.

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For full coverage of the Jan. 6 hearings, go to https://www.apnews.com/capitol-siege.