Roughly 650,000 undocumented young adults who were brought to the U.S. as children, a population class known as “Dreamers,” last week received something from the nation’s high court that they desperately needed: hope for a future with stability and dignity.

Hailed as a victory by immigration advocates, the Supreme Court’s Thursday ruling on the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program provides near-term protection from deportation for its beneficiaries.

This includes the roughly 1,200 Hawaii residents who have lived under that shield since 2012, according to the nonprofit American Immigration Council.

An immediate move to extend that reprieve into lasting security — let alone the full immigration reform the country really needs — seems unlikely in the heat of an election year.

However, a bipartisan alliance is what’s required — and soon — to give the Dreamers a sense that they are permanently welcome in the United States.

That is already a point of accord among many across the partisan divide: Children brought illegally into the U.S. were not responsible for breaking the immigration law and deserve a chance to remain. So timely action to codify DACA in law should be possible.

These are young people who, if they qualified under the DACA criteria, should receive the protection it promised. Many have proven the measure of their determination through achievements in school and careers.

But the 5-4 opinion, written by Chief Justice John Roberts, did not rule on the merits of the program itself. President Donald Trump did have the right to end the program, he said, as it had been set up through executive action by his predecessor, Barack Obama.

Roberts found, instead, that the way the president ended it was “arbitrary and capricious,” that the administration did not provide a policy justification for shutting down DACA. He noted especially that Dreamers had come to rely on it to make other life decisions and meanwhile also had paid billions in taxes to what was now their homeland.

He left the door open for the administration to try again to make a case against the program that sticks. Unfortunately, Trump seems determined to do so, announcing on Friday that he is making just those plans.

There is also a Texas case, still alive, challenging Obama’s authority to create the program. Roberts also said DACA goes beyond the recognized executive prerogative to adopt a “non-enforcement policy” favoring the Dreamers, because the detailed program “created a program for conferring affirmative immigration relief.”

If Congress wants to blunt these efforts to derail DACA, as it should, then it must act to formalize the protection in statute.

Even if it does so, however, DACA is designed to protect only a limited class of undocumented immigrants who were brought to the country within defined dates; this “side-door” entry to the U.S. can’t be an open-ended option.

That then heightens the imperative that Congress also establish an accessible but rationally regulated “front-door” entry as well. Comprehensive immigration reform, including a strategy for securing the border using multiple technologies, should become a top priority of the next Congress, during the next presidential term.

That’s a tall order, but it’s necessary to make it clear how one becomes a citizen of the U.S. The policy should allow favor to those who bring needed skills with them to America. But it also needs to leave room for those who have little but the will to work toward a better life.

This still should be the land of opportunity. Immigrants hoping to realize their dream are still at the heart of the American promise.