A Combat Veteran’s Mission to Restore Trust in Georgia’s Seventh District
Tony Kozycki’s path to Congress began with a bedrock of service. Raised in LaGrange, Georgia, he was inspired by his mother Rebecca a pioneer among women in the U.S. Army who became one of the first females to complete airborne training and served on the Korean DMZ as one of few female officers leading a unit.
That legacy carried Kozycki to the United States Naval Academy, where he was nominated by Senator Saxby Chambliss and graduated in 2008. He went on to become a Naval Aviator flying the F/A-18 Super Hornet, completing three combat deployments in Iraq, Afghanistan, and the Middle East campaign against ISIS. His military decorations include three Air Medals for aerial combat operations, the Navy Commendation Medal, and the Navy Achievement Medal.
Kozycki’s service extended beyond American shores when he was selected as a naval liaison to the Royal Australian Air Force, embedding with their Super Hornet unit and deploying alongside Australian forces during the resurgence of ISIS. Both of his children were born during his time in Australia.
After thirteen years in uniform, Kozycki returned to Georgia and earned his law degree from Georgia State University College of Law in 2021, also attending Harvard Kennedy School. He now runs Kozycki Law, LLC, with his wife and mother a practice heavily focused on immigration law and veteran advocacy.
An active member of North Point Community Church, Kozycki lives in the Alpharetta area with his family and remains engaged with veterans’ organizations including the VFW and American Legion.
A Case That Changed Everything
For Tony Kozycki, the decision to run for Congress came down to a single case file.
“It was December of last year,” he recalls. “I learned about a guy named Godfrey Wade a U.S. Army veteran sitting in a Georgia ICE detention facility.”
Wade had served in Germany at the same time as Kozycki’s mother. He’d never seen a judge before being slated for deportation. The ask was simple: give him one day in court.
Kozycki reached out to incumbent Representative Rich McCormick, expecting the Army veteran turned congressman to help a fellow veteran.
“He did not,” Kozycki says flatly. “They just weren’t willing to do anything.”
As qualifying week approached, Kozycki looked at the field of challengers and made a decision. He talked to his wife, then his kids.
“My wife looked at me and said, ‘Well, you’re the guy that needs to run.’ And we talked to our kids about it they came back and said they were on board. On Thursday we jumped in the race, and we’ve been running ever since.”
Foreign Policy Forged in Combat
Kozycki’s three combat deployments gave him a worldview that defies easy partisan labels. He speaks passionately about the value of American alliances and his alarm at watching them fray.
“Our allies are such a force of strength for us,” he says. “I worked with Australians very closely. I worked with Germans, Polish, Jordanians. The idea that we’re losing those alliances really troubles me.”
He frames the current conflict with Iran through this lens: “It’s exacerbated because we don’t have our allies working with us. When we act alone, it presents a very serious danger for the United States, but also for the world.”
On veterans’ issues, Kozycki draws a direct connection between foreign policy and the VA crisis at home.
“We can’t ask them to go into another endless war in Iran at the same time we’re cutting and slashing funding for veterans back here,” he says. “When we talk about a ground invasion of Iran, we need to be cautious about what that means for our soldiers who make it out but return home trying to rebuild their lives.”
He’s lost colleagues to suicide and speaks about mental health with the weight of personal experience.
“Veterans are trained not to care about their own feelings. I think that’s what leads to a lot of the crisis we have. We need to be very open about the fact that these feelings need to be talked about.”
The Immigration Attorney Who Wants Secure Borders
As an immigration attorney, Kozycki has become accustomed to being attacked from both directions.
“I was attacked hard by the left because I interned with the Department of Homeland Security in the immigration courts,” he says. “I don’t think our government is inherently bad. I think there are immigration laws that we need to enforce.”
But he’s equally direct about where he breaks with the right.
“We are actively suing Mark Wayne Mullin right now. We’ve already defeated Pam Bondi and Kristi Noem in lawsuits because they are intentionally breaking the law,” he says. “We need that to stop. We need trust in our government.”
His three immigration priorities are clear: hold DHS accountable to existing law through congressional oversight, pass DACA reform to provide a pathway for Dreamers, and develop an immigration system that acknowledges the community impact of enforcement.
“When you have a U.S. citizen child in this country, and we’re going to strip away their father or mother we know what that means. They’re going to be disadvantaged the rest of their lives. Why not provide some solution that allows the parent who is working and caring for their children some pathway to stability?”
He anticipates the criticism and addresses it head-on.
“The Democratic Party has not come out and explained a real reasonable policy on border security. I think it’s a failure not to recognize that during the Biden administration the border policy did not work effectively. Republicans had a lot of great points. We need to accept when we’ve done something wrong.”
The Cost of Living Crisis
Kozycki frames housing affordability as a pillar of his campaign, connecting it to the broader economic anxiety he hears from young voters.
“When I talk to college students graduating, they don’t see the American dream that I thought was very attainable when I became an adult,” he says.
His solutions include working across government levels to streamline housing construction and keeping Wall Street out of neighborhoods.
“A twenty-five-year-old newlywed should not be competing against some private equity firm looking to buy a neighborhood. Housing is a necessity. We need to protect the market and keep private equity out of it.”
On tariffs, he’s blunt: “Tariffs have been a disaster for small businesses in Georgia. Businesses can’t project what their costs will be. The idea of broad-ranging tariffs and using tariffs as a bullying tactic has been rejected by economists for years. We need to roll this back.”
Finding Partners Across the Aisle
When asked which Republicans he could work with, Kozycki pauses thoughtfully.
“It’s a struggle to look at the current Republican Party right now because they’ve been taken over by this administration. Donald Trump either makes you all in or he pushes you out.”
He points to Thomas Massie’s willingness to risk his political career over principle, and to Georgia’s Brad Raffensperger and Brian Kemp for standing up to pressure in 2020.
“When they came to Georgia and demanded that Raffensperger hand over our election, he stood up and said no way. I had a great deal of respect for that.”
But his deepest admiration is reserved for the late Senator John McCain, who graduated from the Naval Academy fifty years before Kozycki’s class.
“He was in that fifty-year link of the chain. He gifted our class a copy of the U.S. Constitution that I carry with me to this day,” Kozycki says. “His willingness to stand up and do what he thought was morally right gave me such a deep respect for him.”
Rebuilding Trust, One Step at a Time
Ask Kozycki about restoring faith in government and he gets specific fast.
“When I look to Washington, I see politicians constantly enriching themselves on public information,” he says. “We need to ban congressional insider stock trading—creating a blind trust that every politician is required by law to put their assets into.”
He supports term limits, suggesting twelve to fifteen years as a reasonable range. “This should be a time period you go to Washington, you spend your time rebuilding your community, and then you return home. It shouldn’t be your career as a politician.”
What Keeps Him Up at Night
As a father, Kozycki frames his run in generational terms.
“When I hand this country over to my kids, what will it look like? We hate each other so bad. People hear I’m a Democrat and immediately shut off. A society fails when we stop talking to each other.”
He pauses.
“Democracies fail around the world all the time. We’re no different. We’re bigger, we’re better, we have the ability to do it right. But if we don’t intentionally work to improve it right now, I worry about what we’re handing to our children.”
If elected, his first bill would be DACA reform “something that would show progress in the immigration space and show that we can work together to help a community that’s hurting.”
His closing pitch is characteristically direct.
“I just ask one very simple thing: listen to who I am. If you have a question, reach out and ask. I can guarantee you have more in common with what I want to do for this country than you might expect.”
Tony Kozycki is the Democratic nominee for Georgia’s Seventh Congressional District in the 2026 general election. Learn more at www.kozyckiforcongress.com.
Photography by Joanne Sullivan
