NEW YORK (AP) — A weeklong power failure at a federal detention center in New York City spawned a humanitarian crisis that left inmates shivering in the dark and without access to visitors on some of the coldest days of the year, advocates said in a lawsuit filed Monday.

The Federal Defenders of New York, a public defender organization, sued the Bureau of Prisons, alleging it violated the constitutional rights of inmates at the Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn by denying legal visits during the outage.

Gov. Andrew Cuomo, a Democrat, and a group of Democratic state lawmakers from the c...