The former vice president appears to have made no reference to being arrested in South Africa before campaign appearances this year. But in an interview on CNN’s “New Day” Friday morning, Biden walked back the claim himself for the first time.

“When I said arrested, I meant I was not able to move,” Biden said, after recounting what had happened to him. “Cops would not let me go with them. I wasn't arrested, I was stopped. I was not able to move where I wanted to go.”

His campaign communications director Kate Bedingfield first walked back the claims after Tuesday’s Democratic primary debate in Charleston, S.C., acknowledging to reporters that “he was separated” from the rest of the Congressional Black Caucus delegation he was traveling with, not arrested.

In Biden’s campaign trail retelling, Mandela later thanked him for getting arrested while attempting to see him during that trip, the timing of which has also been disputed by fact-checkers.

On Friday, Biden divulged more about the separation, saying that authorities attempted to have him enter the airport through a “white only” door while steering his black colleagues in a different direction.

“I said, ‘I'm not going to go in that door that says white only. I'm going with them.’ They said, ‘You’re not. You can’t move, you can't go with them.’ And they kept me there until finally [they decided] it was clear I wasn't going to move,” Biden explained. “And so what they finally did, they said, ‘OK, they're gonna not make the congressional delegation go through the black door. They're not going to make me go through the white door. They took us — memory serves me — through a baggage claim area up to a restaurant and they cleared out a restaurant.”

That description is more in line with an incident Biden referenced in a 2013 statement mourning Mandela's death.

Biden has faced similar scrutiny about other anecdotes he’s shared on the campaign trail, most notably when The Washington Post raised questions about whether he conflated multiple real life events when speaking about his past meetings with Afghanistan war heroes.

At the time, he refuted those criticisms, asserting that “the central point” of the stories were “absolutely accurate” and denying “that there’s anything I said about that that wasn’t the essence of the story.”

The latest questions about his campaign trail recollections come as the former vice president is facing a do-or-die test in the South Carolina primary this weekend on the heels of disappointing performances in the first three Democratic primary contests.