Burnat, whose "Five Broken Cameras" is up for best documentary at Sunday's 85th Academy Awards, said late on Wednesday that it was abnormal that he was held up at the airport for an hour.
"I am the first Palestinian that has a documentary nominated to the Oscars. And it's important to be an Oscar nominee. So to hold at the airport an Oscar nominee and start to question him, it's not normal," he said.
"We go through this in our country because we live in a not normal situation under Israeli occupation," and have to go through checkpoints and border crossings all the time, he added.
"I felt the same thing when they stopped me in Los Angeles, because I am a Palestinian and I have a Palestinian passport so there is no big respect for me and my passport," he said.
Burnat spoke late Wednesday at an Oscars-organized event for documentary nominees, including candidates, 24 hours after arriving in the United States from Turkey.
In a statement earlier, he said guards wanted proof that he was nominated for an Oscar, adding that "if I couldn't prove the reason for my visit, my wife Soraya, my son Gibreel and I would be sent back to Turkey on the same day."
"After 40 minutes of questions and answers, Gibreel asked me why we were still waiting in that small room. I simply told him the truth: 'Maybe we'll have to go back.' I could see his heart sink."
Burnat spent five years filming his village's resistance to Zionist settlers to make "Five Broken Cameras," which won the foreign documentary directing prize at last year's Sundance Film Festival.
The West Bank village of Bilin, some six miles (10 kilometers) west of Ramallah, made headlines when its inhabitants demonstrated in 2005 against a Zionist settlement on their land.
That same year, Burnat, then an olive picker, received a small camera as a gift for the birth of his fourth child. He rapidly developed from making family home movies to filming the resistance of Bilin.