It has been argued that neutrinos originating from ultrahigh energy cosmic rays can produce black holes deep in the atmosphere in models with TeV-scale quantum gravity. Such black-hole events could be observed at the Auger Observatory. However, any phenomenologically viable model with a low scale of quantum gravity must explain how to preserve protons from rapid decay. We argue that the suppression of proton decay will also suppress lepton-nucleon scattering and hence black-hole production by scattering of ultrahigh energy cosmic ray neutrinos in the atmosphere. We discuss explicitly the split fermion solution to the problem of fast proton decay.