In Texas, land grants were never subject to a federally legislated commission. Because Texas had attained statehood in 1845, it retained jurisdiction over the entirety of its border regions and thus claimed exemption from the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo. The Texas state government thus took the matter of land grants into its own hands, when governor Peter H. Bell appointed William H. Bourland and James Miller to determine the validity of Spanish and Mexican land holdings in the state. At its first hearing in Webb County, the Bourland-Miller Commission faced significant opposition from the local Mexican American landowners, who claimed that the commission had been established in order to seize the property of Tejanos and take away their full rights. Miller and Bourland were able to win over the landowning elite of the Laredo area, however, by conducting an "impartial" proceeding, which resulted in all the Tejano families retaining their landholdings. In the rest of the state, however, the commission was less favorable to the land-owning claims of the Tejanos. In areas of Southwest Texas, fewer than half of all land grants were recognized as legitimate by the commission, and many of the ones which were recognized as legitimate were already owned by Anglo Texans.