When Biden Stated That He Did Not Count 'Drunk Driving As a Felony' to be Deported

While falsely claiming for years that his first wife Neilia Hunter Biden and daughter Naomi were killed by a drunk driver, the then vice-president Joe Biden stated, "I don't count drunk driving as a felony," during a 2020 Vice News panel on minority issues. “You change the culture by saying you are going to get fired. You are fired if, in fact, you do that. You only arrest to deal with a felony that’s committed, and I don’t count drunk driving as a felony,” Biden said. 

As per The National Reviewer, in response to a question about "what specific changes would you bring to ICE as an agency," Biden declared that he would terminate any agent who attempted to deport an undocumented immigrant who was not facing criminal charges. The remarks came in despite Biden previously stating that “it was an errant driver who stopped to drink instead of drive and hit—a tractor-trailer—hit my children and my wife and killed them, during a 2001 speech at the University of Delaware. “A tractor-trailer, a guy who allegedly — and I never pursued it — drank his lunch instead of eating his lunch, broadsided my family and killed my wife instantly and killed my daughter instantly and hospitalized my two sons,” Biden once again mentioned during a campaign rally in 2007, as per Washington Times. 

That was denied by the driver's daughter, Pamela Hamill, and the state official in charge of the probe. As per reports, Hamill, the daughter of driver Curtis C. Dunn, asked Biden to publicly apologize during the 2008 presidential campaign after he informed a crowd that her father "drank his lunch" before the tragedy. "The family feels these statements are both hurtful and untrue and we didn’t know where they originated from,” Hamill said at the time.

As per Politico, in 2019, after a 2009 CBS article detailing how her father Curtis Dunn "was haunted and was tormented" by the incident surfaced, Biden made a call to apologize. "He grieved over that," Hamill said. "He was haunted and was tormented by that for years." 

"The truth is, it was a tragic accident," she said. "No alcohol was involved." Delaware Judge Jerome Herlihy, who was in charge of the case, supported Hamill's claim. He said, "There was no indication that the truck driver had been drinking." And later, a spokesman for Biden said that the senator "fully accepts the Dunn family's word that these rumors were false." Hamill expressed gratitude saying, "He was a good, hard-working man and wonderful father," she said. While also added that it was a peaceful closure, "He apologized for hurting my family in any way,” she said. “So we accepted that — and kind of end of story from there.”