Hi, olá, hola 👋
I'm a reporter and illustrator for The Baltimore Banner, where I've worked for two years. In my time in Baltimore, I've covered gun violence through the perspective of teens, community clashes with developers and the growing Latino and immigrant communities. I also covered the collapse of the Francis Scott Key bridge.
Scroll down to read my work.
Before joining The Banner, I interned at The Hill and The Baltimore Sun. I graduated from the University of Maryland in May of 2022.
Say hello:
@claralfreitas on Twitter. Or email me at clara.longo@thebaltimorebanner.com.
SELECTED REPORTING
If the weather cooperates, on Tuesday she will enter the bay near the Chesapeake Bay Bridge and swim more than 24 miles to the Harborplace Amphitheater in Baltimore’s Inner Harbor, one of her longest swims ever — a never-before-done swim and the longest anyone has attempted in the harbor in decades.
For the last decade, children have been traveling to the U.S. southwest border in record numbers, with more than 33,000 unaccompanied children arriving in Maryland since October 2014.
The six missing workers were all part of Baltimore’s flourishing Latino community, immigrant advocates say.
Days before Christmas, I was sitting in a nearly empty newsroom looking for a story. I scrolled somewhat erratically through social media until I came across a post by Meghan Lewis.
How the 19 of them got there started with the family learning of Peggy’s cancer diagnosis. Distance and time had kept them from being ingrained in each other’s lives as they once were, but when Peggy needed her family, it was like no time had passed.
The bench became particularly special after upward mobility, a city-backed revitalization effort, and gentrification in the ’70s began transforming the neighborhood, which had grown into the heart of Baltimore’s Native American community, mostly populated by Lumbee.